Home/ Questions/Q 6973339
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-05-27T17:05:44+00:00

I am looking at Hbase for a schema-less user action store (user x viewed

  • 0

I am looking at Hbase for a schema-less user action store (“user x viewed y”, “user x viewed y from page z”).

HBase seems a great choice as it

  1. stores data in schema-less format, as well as,
  2. can support complex queries like an RDBMS

Yes, performance considerations come later.

Question 1: What features of an RDBMS will I miss if I use HBase?

If I used an RDBMS, I would use features like SUM, WHERE, GROUP BY, ORDER, BETWEEN, comparisons and (inner) joins; and upto 2NF normalization. Nothing more complex.

Question 2: Apart from the querying, what about:

  • altering schema
  • single step backup of the entire cluster
  • master-slave replication and clustering (sorry, this may be more of a Hadoop question, but HBase overview treats it separately)

that are straightforward on an RDBMS?

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    HBase is very far from an RDBMS. Hive lets your write Map/Reduce jobs with SQL-ish syntax but these are still map/reduce jobs.

    From your expectations it sounds you should look at sharding solutions over regular RDBMS eg. ScaleDB or ScaleBase

    • 0