BigTable/HBase Architecture

BigTableF. Chang et al., “Bigtable: A Distributed Storage System for Structured Data,” in Proceedings of 7th {USENIX} Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI), 2006. is a distributed storage system initially developed in Google and was the inspiration for HBase, a distributed datastore that is part of the Apache Hadoop project.

Note that the architecture of these two systems is very similar to each other, so we will focus only on HBase, which is an open-source system.

HBase data model

HBase provides a sparse, multi-dimensional sorted map as a data model, as shown in the following illustration:

The map is indexed by a row key, a column key (e.g. C1, C2, C4 etc.) and a timestamp, while each value in the map is an uninterpreted ...