Well said, Stack. :) Maybe HBase needs more celebrity endorsements? ;) Another important point you should mention to your manager is that (as far as I can see) CitrusLeaf is a closed-source, proprietary product. While there's no harm in this, it does introduce a dependency on Citrusleaf to fix issues. By contrast, in a fully open-source product like HBase, you have complete control over your destiny; you can fix bugs, branch and change the software, and get community help (for free) if things don't seem to be working correctly (and, there are services companies like Cloudera and HortonWorks who provide paid support as well).
That, and the fact that HBase is already being proven in production environments at scale (Facebook<http://highscalability.com/blog/2011/3/22/facebooks-new-realtime-analytics-system-hbase-to-process-20.html>, for example) should make for good arguments; I don't see much on the CitrusLeaf website about other companies using them in big production deployments. On the speed issue, note that while it's traditionally been possible to attain more raw speed in a C++ application, the biggest speed gains usually come from algorithmic advances, not low-level optimization. As such, the fact that HBase is written in java means that it's easier to refactor and bring new approaches to the same problems than it would be in a C++ application (and, as a bonus, the pool of capable developers to contribute is also much bigger). For most applications, squeezing the last ounces of performance out of the code is less important than being able to refactor and improve rapidly over time. If your management still demands that C++ must be better, press them to come up with real throughput and latency requirements, and see if HBase (or Citrusleaf, or Hypertable, any other product) can meet them. The Yahoo Cloud Serving Benchmark tool is a good way to run benchmarks like this. Ian On Sep 7, 2011, at 10:00 AM, Stack wrote: On Tue, Sep 6, 2011 at 10:24 PM, Something Something <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: I am a HUGE fan of HBase, but our management team wants us to evaluate CitrusLeaf (http://citrusleaf.net/index.php). I have NO idea why! Their website features lucelle ball! Our management claims that CitrusLeaf is (got to be) faster because it's written in C++. Trying to find if there's any truth to that. If there were no managers, we'd have no work. St.Ack
