Leon, The HBase Architecture page in the wiki does give this kind of information, specifically here: http://wiki.apache.org/hadoop/Hbase/HbaseArchitecture#metadata and since HBase is a Bigtable clone, reading it's paper also gives useful information: http://labs.google.com/papers/bigtable.html
To make it short, the client queries the .META. table to find the users tables regions to which it puts and gets data. Thrift only acts a as decorator on the Java HBase client. Until Zookeeper is integrated in HBase (like Chubby for Bigtable), the Master is a SPOF but should not have any scalability-related problem. Hope this helps, J-D On Sun, Aug 3, 2008 at 7:22 PM, Leon Mergen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hello, > > I'm looking for some information on hbase's architecture (out of pure > interest), which i wasn't able to find anything about it on the Hbase site > (including the architecture description). > > Specifically, I am curious how writes/mutations are distributed amongst the > servers, and whether this is different when using an interface like Thrift. > Is a server located for each mutateRow () operations "asked for" at the > master server, or is that cached at some level ? If not, how is that > problem > solved that a client only connects to the master server but actually needs > to talk to one of the slave servers ? Or is the master server a single weak > spot that could introduce scalability problems on large (huge) scale ? > > Thanks in advance for any responses! > > Regards, > > Leon Mergen >
