We've got a patch we've made to HBaseStorage which allows a caller to turn off the WriteAheadLog feature while doing bulk loads into hbase.
>From the performance tuning wikipage: http://wiki.apache.org/hadoop/PerformanceTuning "To speed up the inserts in a non critical job (like an import job), you can use Put.writeToWAL(false) to bypass writing to the write ahead log." We've tested this on HBase 0.20.6 and it helps dramatically. It sounds like future versions of HBase support a feature like this by default--so maybe this problem goes away when we start using 0.90? Is this something valuable to contribute back?
