All things considered, I tend to see HBase as being a little more on the "industrial strength" side of things. It's designed to handle really large data volumes and run on tens or hundreds of machines, and very low-level control is given to the operator so that its usage can be tuned meticulously. It's certainly possible for a one-person-show to run it, given that person is a pretty badass devops type who knows a lot about cluster administration, puppet, jvm tuning, and distributed systems.
If you are this person, and know you'll have industrial-strength data needs, hbase might be for you. But, the "right" answer here depends almost entirely on the specifics of your situation. What is it about your domain that makes you think MySQL isn't a good fit? Do you have the option of using a more generic storage model in your app (using something like, say Apache Gora, as an abstraction layer) and then bump up from simple storage in MySQL to HBase later when volume demands it? Have you researched other options like DynamoDB or Riak, where you can potentially have lower startup costs in exchange for less bare metal control later? Ian On May 19, 2012, at 9:54 AM, "S Ahmed" <sahmed1...@gmail.com> wrote: > Just want your opinions on this, I am beginning to get a feel for hbase and > was wondering if it database more suited for companies with dedicated teams > for devops/development or is it something a 1-man show could use and keep > up? > > i.e. Say I wanted to create a Saas application like bitly, or a > metrics/analytics application. > > Would it be advisable to go with something like hbase? > > (let's assume for the moment that starting off with mysql won't work for > the given domain/use case, and that paying for 5-6 dedicated servers isn't > an issue).
