Hi, I'm learning more about HBase and I'm curious how much of HBase is actually based on Google's original dB. In Google's origins stories, they are well known for using low cost commodity hardware in scale in order to store their web database.
Almost every blog I read about HBase tells me it's a clone of BigTable. Almost every blog I've read about HBase also tells me to use a lot of RAM - gigabytes worth. Some even tell me not to even consider HBase with less than 4GB of RAM. If I remember my history correctly, a commodity machine in the year 2003 had around 512MB to 1GB of RAM in it. The fancier ones had, 2GB. From everything I've read, running HBase on such machines is a very bad idea yet this was the machines readily available in the year 2003 when Google started it's growth. I'm confused at the moment. Can someone give me a bit of background about how HBase performance is handled from the "low" end which was considered "high" end back then? Should I assume that HBase is just a clone of BigTable? What is HBase's history? Are the blogs wrong? Thanks for any clarification anyone can give.
