Hi, I wanted to let you know that I'm planning to contribute the following items to the HBase community. These are my spare time projects and I'll only be able to spend my time about 7 hours a week, so the progress will be very slow. I want some feedback from you guys to prioritize them. Also, if someone/team wants to work on them (with me or alone), I'll be happy to provide more details.
1. RADOS integration Run HBase not only on HDFS but also RADOS distributed object store (the lower layer of Ceph), so that the following options will become available to HBase users: -- No SPOF (RADOS doesn't have the name node(s), but only ZK-like monitors and data nodes) -- Instant backup of HBase tables (RADOS provides copy-on-write snapshot per object pool) -- Extra durability option on WAL (RADOS can do both synchronous and asynchronous disk flush. HDFS doesn't have the earlier option) Note: RADOS object = HFile, WAL object pool = group of HFiles or WAL Current status: Design phase 2. mapreduce.HFileInputFormat MR library to read data directly from HFiles. (Roughly 2.5 times faster than TableInputFormat in my tests) Current status: Completed a proof-of-concept prototype and measured performance. 3. Enhance Get/Scan performance of RS Add an hash code and a couple of flags to HFile at the flush time and change scanner implementation so that: -- Get/Scan operations will get faster. (less key comparisons for reconstructing a row: O(h * c) -> O(h). [h = number of HFiles for the row, c = number of columns in an HFile]) -- The size of HFiles will become a bit smaller. (The flags will eliminate duplicate bytes in keys (row, column family and qualifier) from HFiles.) Current status: Completed a proof-of-concept prototype and measured performance. Detals: https://github.com/tatsuya6502/hbase-mr-pof/ (I meant "poc" not "pof"...) 4. Writing Japanese books and documents -- Currently I'm authoring a book chapter about HBase for a Japanese NOSQL book -- I'll translate The Apache HBase Book to Japanese Thank you, -- Tatsuya Kawano (Mr.) Tokyo, Japan http://twitter.com/#!/tatsuya6502
