HBase in Action

Name: HBase in Action
ISBN: 9787115324467

Nick Dimiduk / Amandeep KhuranaPosts & Telecom Press2013

Rating 3.9

Word count: 458K words
Chapters: 13
ISBN: 9787115324467

Summary

Many HBase books present HBase as a checklist of APIs; this one does not. Both authors have spent years solving real problems with HBase in production—Nick Dimiduk was using HBase as early as 2008 to tame ETL jobs that had been taking over twenty hours, and Amandeep Khurana worked on solution architecture at the Amazon Elastic MapReduce team and later at Cloudera. As a result, the book is full of the trade-offs behind "why design it this way" rather than "call the API like this." The through-line is a single example application, TwitBase, which runs from table creation, reads and writes, and scans all the way to row-key design, denormalization, coprocessors, and multi-language clients via REST/Thrift, so readers can see a table evolve from a draft into a design that can withstand its access patterns. The two chapters in Part 3 on OpenTSDB and geospatial indexing are especially valuable: the former is a retrospective on time-series modeling in a real open-source project, and the latter breaks geohash spatial indexing down to a level you can implement yourself—content that was rare in Chinese books of the same period. The translator is Xie Lei, founder of the ChinaHadoop technical community, and the terminology and code comments are handled in a practical, down-to-earth way, making the book well suited to reading while typing along. One caveat: the book corresponds to an early version of HBase (it still uses the -ROOT- table), so details such as cluster sizing and region location differ from today's 2.x versions; separate the underlying principles from the version-specific details as you read.

Editor's review

很多 HBase 书把 HBase 当作一张 API 清单来讲，这本不是。两位作者都是长年在一线用 HBase 解决实际问题的人，Nick Dimiduk 早在 2008 年就用 HBase 把一批耗时二十多小时的 ETL 作业理顺，Amandeep Khurana 先后在 Amazon Elastic MapReduce 团队和 Cloudera 做方案架构。因此书中处处是“为什么这样设计”的取舍，而非“API 这样调用”。全书的主线是一个贯穿始终的示例应用 TwitBase，从建表、读写、扫描一路走到行键设计、反规范化、协处理器和 REST/Thrift 多语言客户端，读者能完整看到一张表如何从草稿变成能扛住访问模式的设计。第三部分的 OpenTSDB 与地理空间索引两章尤其难得：前者是真实开源项目的时间序列建模复盘，后者把 geohash 空间索引拆到可动手实现的粒度，这类内容在同期中文书里并不多见。译者是 ChinaHadoop 技术社区的发起人谢磊，术语与代码注释处理得比较贴地，适合边读边敲。需要提醒的是，本书对应的 HBase 版本较早（写作时仍在使用 -ROOT- 表），集群规模评估、region 定位等细节与当今 2.x 版本已有差异，读的时候要把原理和版本细节分开看。

Who it's for

A good fit for

已经会用 Hadoop/HDFS、正准备在生产环境引入 HBase 的后端工程师
需要为海量稀疏数据做表结构与行键设计的数据库/数据架构师
做日志、时序、地理信息类系统的研发人员，想找可参考的建模案例
把英文原版读得吃力、希望有中文术语对照的技术读者

Not a good fit for

完全没接触过 Java 与分布式系统的零基础读者，前几章会很快失去抓手
只想查 HBase 2.x 新版 API 与运维手册的人，本书版本明显偏旧
需要大量 SQL 优化技巧的传统关系型数据库管理员

Reading tips

准备一个可运行的 HBase 伪分布式环境，边读边执行 Shell 与 Java 示例，比只看代码有效得多
把第 4 章行键设计当作全书核心精读，读完后回头用自己手头的业务表重做一遍设计练习
第 7、8 章可以当作案例拆解阅读，重点看访问模式如何推导出模式结构，不必逐行抄代码
阅读时注意版本差异：书中 -ROOT- 表等内容在 HBase 2.x 已取消，遇到细节请对照官方文档验证

About the publisher

Posts & Telecom Press China · Founded in 1953

Posts & Telecom Press is known for its strengths in science and technology, computing, and information and communications titles, and has extended its publishing into photography, art, software learning, and inspirational growth, giving it a fairly diverse range. Its catalog includes computing and communications works such as Refactoring and Patterns (Revised Edition) and Huawei Switch Learning Guide (Second Edition), alongside bilingual collector's editions such as The Little Prince (Chinese-English-French illustrated collector's edition), The Great Gatsby, and Three Days to See. Beijing Ten Years: 1980-1990 and Ghost Blade: WLOP Personal Illustration Collection reflect its presence in photography and art. Its authors include Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Helen Keller, Joshua Kerievsky, Wang Da, Zhang Zhaozeng, and WLOP.

Part 1 HBase Fundamentals
Chapter 1 Introducing HBase
Chapter 2 Getting Started (Creating Tables, Data Operations, Read/Write Paths, Data Coordinates, Data Model, Table Scans, Filters, Atomic Operations, ACID Semantics)
Chapter 3 Distributed HBase, HDFS, and MapReduce
Part 2 Advanced Concepts
Chapter 4 HBase Table Design (Modeling the Problem, Denormalization, Row-Key Design Strategies, IO Considerations, From Relational to Non-Relational, Advanced Column-Family Configuration, Filtering Data)
Chapter 5 Extending HBase with Coprocessors (Observer Coprocessors, Endpoint Coprocessors)
Chapter 6 Alternative HBase Client Options (Shell Scripts, JRuby, REST, Python Thrift, asynchbase)
Part 3 Example Applications
Chapter 7 Learning HBase Through an Example: OpenTSDB
Chapter 8 Querying Geographic Information Systems on HBase (Geohash Spatial Indexing, Nearest-Neighbor Queries)
Part 4 Getting HBase Running
Chapter 9 Deploying HBase (Cluster Planning, Master, RegionServer, ZooKeeper, Cloud Services)

FAQ

这本书和《HBase权威指南》有什么区别？

《HBase权威指南》偏重体系结构与参考手册式的完整覆盖；《HBase实战》以示例应用为主线，把知识塞进具体开发场景，更侧重如何设计表、选行键、写协处理器和部署上线，适合先动手再看原理的读者。

没有 Hadoop 基础能读懂吗？

官方定位是不要求事先掌握 HBase、Hadoop 或 MapReduce，第 3 章专门补了 MapReduce 与 HDFS 的必要背景。但实际阅读仍然需要 Java 与分布式系统的基本概念，完全零基础会更吃力。

简体中文版是谁翻译的？

简体中文版由人民邮电出版社 2013 年出版，译者是谢磊，他是 ChinaHadoop 技术社区的发起人，长期从事企业级大数据解决方案工作。

书中的版本内容现在还适用吗？

原书写作于 HBase 0.9x 时代，书中讲到的 -ROOT- 表、客户端 API 细节与今天的 HBase 2.x 已有差别。表设计思路、行键策略、反规范化等原理性内容依然成立，但涉及具体命令与配置时应以官方文档为准。

适合用来准备面试吗？

可以用于理解 HBase 的数据模型、读写路径和表设计考量，这些是面试常问的核心。但它不是题库式速查书，仍需要自己总结成要点。

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Nick Dimiduk Author

Nick Dimiduk is a computer technology author about whom limited public information is available; his representative work that can be confirmed is HBase in Action. The book falls into the category of computer and database topics and focuses on HBase, a distributed database, addressing developers and engineers who need to understand and apply this technology. Judging from the positioning of the work, Dimiduk's writing leans toward practice, attending to the connection between technical principles and hands-on operation, and seeking to help readers understand and use the relevant tools in real project scenarios. Because only one of his works is included in the collection, information about his nationality, dates of birth and death, educational background, and professional experience cannot be verified, so no further inferences about his life should be made. Overall, his recognition among Chinese readers rests mainly on this technical work, which also offers Chinese readers studying HBase a reference resource.

Amandeep Khurana Author

Amandeep Khurana is a computer technology author about whom relatively little information is available; his nationality, dates of birth and death, and professional career are not clearly documented in public sources. What can be confirmed is that he is the author of HBase in Action, a book in the field of computers and databases. Centered on HBase, a distributed data storage system, it is aimed at developers and operations personnel who need to handle large-scale data. Judging from the subject matter, his writing leans toward engineering practice, emphasizing how technical principles apply in real-world scenarios rather than staying at the level of conceptual introduction. Since only one of his works is held in the collection and biographical and background information is lacking, readers' understanding of him comes mainly from this technical book itself, and his influence among Chinese readers is essentially tied to the book's circulation in the database technology field.