A few observations I can make from watching both communities (although
only really participating in Accumulo's).
- HBase undeniably has a much larger public community of both users and
developers; however, we are seeing broader adoption across different
vertical markets with Accumulo. IMO, I think we have a rather responsive
community built up here. Lots of smart people are working that are
available and happy to help with problems.
- BatchScanner: The BatchScanner is a query construct which will
automatically fetch data from a collection of Ranges on a table and
return the results in the form of a Java Iterator. This makes for a very
natural way to read lots of data from Accumulo, automatically performing
some reduction in the data server-side (using Accumulo Iterators), and
getting a wonderfully simple Iterator<Entry<Key,Value>> in your client
code. It really helps to encourage a state-less and functional-like
style to your code.
I really like it, and, when combined with the ability to push a bunch of
work server-side, it has often kept me from having to write MapReduce
jobs (which is always a win to me).
- Accumulo Iterators are a common thing you might hear as a difference.
AFAICT, they're a bit more powerful than what you can do with HBase
filters because you are presented with a stream of Key-Value pairs
inside of the TServer. Again, it's a bit functional programming
inspired. You have the ability to combine, consume, seek within the
stream and do what you please (more context would be helpful in giving
specific examples)
That being said, Iterators do come with a learning curve, but that's to
be expected with the amount of flexibility they provide. It's just like
anything else :)
- <disclaimer>I can't comment about running HBase in production
environments, but I tend to hear a lot of "war stories" about it. I also
don't know how much of this is from running old version of HBase which
don't have known issues patched. </disclaimer>
In my experience, Accumulo just works. It doesn't require much
day-to-day interaction, processes stay running and if some node goes
haywire, I have absolutely no qualms against `kill -9`'ing it and
knowing that everything will come back fine.
My $0.02.
- Josh
On 6/23/14, 2:49 PM, Josh Elser wrote:
Another way you could word this is that Accumulo has a very "mature"
security implementation, whereas, like you pointed out, HBase has only
recently added this in 0.98.
The note about how visibility being in the Key as opposed to the Value
also has impact when writing Iterators. Because the visibility is a
"first class citizen" instead of an afterthought, having it uniquely
define some pair makes aggregations much easier to think about, IMO.
This is especially prevalent when doing this server-side with an
Accumulo Iterator.
There are also other differences between the implementations visibility
filtering, the most common being the support of a "NOT" operator in
HBase whereas Accumulo explicitly chose not to implement this. By
allowing "NOT" into the syntax, it becomes much more possible that data
is inadvertently leaked. Marking data correctly is more difficult than
it seems and introducing the ability to negate certain branches makes it
even more difficult. Auditors are scary :)
- Josh
On 6/23/14, 2:34 PM, Aaron wrote:
I'm not sure of all the differences, but, wrt HBase Cell Level security
(CLS)..while similar..not 100% the same. If I understand how the HBase
CLS works it's extension to ACL system. And that ACL is "applied" to a
cell. In Accumulo's case, it is part of the key. So the ramification
is that in Accumulo, you can have:
RowID, CF, CQ, VIS1, TS --> Value1
RowID, CF, CQ, VIS2, TS --> Value2
If everything is the same, including the timestamp, the visibility can
actually determine which value to return. So, a more concrete example
would be:
XXX, METADATA, NAME, everyone, 100--> Bruce Wayne
XXX, METADATA, NAME, alfred-only, 100--> Batman
Where Alfred could/would see both "values"...but, everyone else would
only see "Bruce"
Hope that helps.
Cheers,
Aaron
PS: this is my understanding of how HBase CLS works...based on what I
have read/interpreted.
On Mon, Jun 23, 2014 at 1:55 PM, Jianshi Huang <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Er... basically I need to explain to my manager why choosing
Accumulo, instead of HBase.
So what are the pros and cons of Accumulo vs. HBase? (btw HBase 0.98
also got cell-level security, modeled after Accumulo)
--
Jianshi Huang
LinkedIn: jianshi
Twitter: @jshuang
Github & Blog: http://huangjs.github.com/
