This document provides an introduction to HBase internals and schema design for HBase users. It discusses the logical and physical views of HBase, including how tables are split into regions and stored across region servers. It covers best practices for schema design, such as using row keys efficiently and avoiding redundancy. The document also briefly discusses advanced topics like coprocessors and compression. The overall goal is to help HBase users optimize performance and scalability based on its internal architecture.

1. Intro to HBase
Internals &
Schema Design
(for HBase Users)
Alex Baranau, Sematext International, 2012
Monday, July 9, 12

2. About Me
Software Engineer at Sematext International
http://blog.sematext.com/author/abaranau
@abaranau
http://github.com/sematext (abaranau)
Monday, July 9, 12

3. Agenda
Logical view
Physical view
Schema design
Other/Advanced topics
Monday, July 9, 12

4. Why?
Why should I (HBase user) care about
HBase internals?
HBase will not adjust cluster
settings to optimal based on usage
patterns automatically
Schema design, table settings
(defined upon creation), etc.
depend on HBase implementation
aspects
Monday, July 9, 12

5. Logical View
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6. Logical View: Regions
HBase cluster serves multiple tables, distinguished by
name
Each table contains of rows
Each row contains cells:
(row key, column family, column, timestamp) -> value
Table is split into Regions (table shards, each
contains full rows), defined by start and end row keys
Monday, July 9, 12

7. Logical View: Regions are
Shards
Regions are “atoms of distribution”
Each region assigned to single RegionServer
(HBase cluster slave)
Rows of particular Region served by single
RS (cluster slave)
Regions are distributed evenly across RSs
Region has configurable max size
When region reaches max size (or on request)
it is split into two smaller regions, which
can be assigned to different RSs
Monday, July 9, 12

8. Logical View: Regions on
Cluster
ZooKeeper
ZooKeeper
ZooKeeper
client HMaster
HMaster
Region Region
RegionServer
Region Region Region Region
RegionServer
RegionServer
RegionServer RegionServer
Monday, July 9, 12

9. Logical View: Regions Load
It is essential for Regions under the
load to be evenly distributed across
the cluster
It is HBase user’s job to make sure
the above is true. Note: even
distribution of Regions over cluster
doesn’t imply that the load is evenly
distributed
Monday, July 9, 12

10. Logical View: Regions Load
Take into account that rows are stored in ordered
manner
Make sure you don’t write rows with sequential
keys to avoid RS hotspotting*
When writing data with monotonically increasing/decreasing
keys, data is written at one RS at a time
Use pre-splitting of the table upon creation
Starting with single region means using one RS for some time
In general, splitting can be expensive
Increase max region size
* see https://github.com/sematext/HBaseWD
Monday, July 9, 12

11. Logical View: Slow RSs
When load is distributed evenly, watch for
slowest RSs (HBase slaves)
Since every region served by single RS,
one slow RS can slow down cluster
performance e.g. when:
data is written into multiple RSs at
even pace (random value-based row keys)
data is being read from many RSs when
doing scan
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12. Physical View
Monday, July 9, 12

13. Physical View: Write/Read Flow
HTable client client
buffer HTable
write read RegionServer
Region z Region ...
...
Store Store
MemStore MemStore
(per CF) (per CF)
flush
HFile HFile ... HFile HFile
Write Ahead Log
HDFS
Monday, July 9, 12

14. Physical: Speed up Writing
Enabling & increasing client-side buffer reduces RPC
operations amount
warn: possible loss of buffered data
in case of client failure; design for failover
in case of write failure (networking/server-
side issues); can be handled on client
Disabling WAL increases write speed
warn: possible data loss in case of RS failure
Use bulk import functionality (writes HFiles
directly, which can be later added to HBase)
Monday, July 9, 12

15. Physical: Memstore Flushes
When memstore is flushed N HFiles are created (one per
CF)
Memstore size which causes flushing is configured on
two levels:
per RS: % of heap occupied by memstores
per table: size in MB of single memstore (per CF)
of Region
When Region memstores flushes, memstores of all CFs
are flushed
Uneven data amount between CFs causes too many
flushes & creation of too many HFiles (one per CF
every time)
In most cases having one CF is the best design
Monday, July 9, 12

16. Physical: Memstore Flushes
Important: there are Memstore size
thresholds which cause writes to be blocked,
so slow memstore flushes and overuse of
memory by memstore can cause write perf
degradation
Hint: watch for flush queue size metric on
RSs
At the same time the more memory memstore
uses the better for writing/reading perf
(unless it reaches those “write blocking”
thresholds)
Monday, July 9, 12

17. Physical: Memstore Flushes
Example of good situation
*
* http://sematext.com/spm/index.html
Monday, July 9, 12

18. Physical: HFiles Compaction
HFiles are periodically compacted into bigger
HFiles containing same data
Reading from less HFiles faster
Important: there’s a configured max number of files
in Store which, when reached causes writes to block
Hint: watch for compaction queue size metric on
RSs
read Store
MemStore
(per CF)
HFile HFile
Monday, July 9, 12

19. Physical: Data Locality
RSs are usually collocated HDFS
with HDFS DataNodes MapReduce
HBase
RegionServer RegionServer
TaskTracker
TaskTracker
DataNode DataNode
Slave Node Slave Node
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20. Physical: Data Locality
HBase tries to assign Regions to RSs so that
Region data stored physically on the same node.
But sometimes fails
after Region splits there’s no guarantee that
there’s a node that has all blocks (HDFS level)
of new Region and
no guarantee that HBase will not re-assign this
Region to different RS in future (even
distribution of Regions takes preference over
data locality)
There’s an ongoing work towards better preserving
data locality
Monday, July 9, 12

21. Physical: Data Locality
Also, data locality can break when:
Adding new slaves to cluster
Removing slaves from cluster
Incl. node failures
Hint: look at networking IO between slaves when writing/reading
data, it should be minimal
Important:
make sure HDFS is well balanced (use balancer tool)
try to rebalance Regions in HBase cluster if possible (HBase
Master restart will do that) to regain data locality
Pre-split table on creation to limit (ideally avoid) splits
and regions movement; manage splits manually sometimes helps
Monday, July 9, 12

22. Schema Design
(very briefly)
Monday, July 9, 12

23. Schema: row keys
Using row key (or keys range) is the most
efficient way to retrieve the data from HBase
Row key design is major part of schema design
Note: no secondary indices available out of
the box
Row Key Data
‘login_2012-03-01.00:09:17’ d:{‘user’:‘alex’}
... ...
‘login_2012-03-01.23:59:35’ d:{‘user’:‘otis’}
‘login_2012-03-02.00:00:21’ d:{‘user’:‘david’}
Monday, July 9, 12

24. Schema: row keys
Redundancy is OK!
warn: changing two rows in HBase is not atomic operation
Row Key Data
‘login_2010-01-01.00:09:17’ d:{‘user’:‘alex’}
... ...
‘login_2012-03-01.23:59:35’ d:{‘user’:‘otis’}
‘alex_2010-01-01.00:09:17’ d:{‘action’:‘login’}
... ...
‘otis_2012-03-01.23:59:35’ d:{‘action’:‘login’}
‘alex_login_2010-01-01.00:09:17’ d:{‘device’:’pc’}
... ...
‘otis_login_2012-03-01.23:59:35’ d:{‘device’:‘mobile’}
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25. Schema: Relations
Not relational
No joins
Denormalization is OK! Use ‘nested entities’
Row Key Data
d:{
student_firstname:Alex,
student_lastname:Baranau,
student
professor_math_firstname:David,
* ‘student_abaranau’ professor_math_lastname:Smart,
* professor_cs_firstname:Jack,
professor professor_cs_lastname:Weird,
}
‘prof_dsmart’ d:{...}
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26. Schema: row key/CF/qual size
HBase stores cells individually
great for “sparse” data
row key, CF name and column name stored with each
cell which may affect data amount to be stored and
managed
keep them short
serialize and store many values into single cell
Row Key Data
d:{
s:Alex#Baranau#cs#2009,
‘s_abaranau’ p_math:David#Smart,
p_cs:Jack#Weird,
}
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27. Other/Advanced
Topics
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28. Advanced: Co-Processors
CoProcessors API (HBase 0.92.0+) allows to:
execute (querying/aggregation/etc.)
logic on server side (you may think of
it as of stored procedures in RDBMS)
perform auditing of actions performed on
server-side (you may think of it as of
triggers in RDBMS)
apply security rules for data access
and many more cool stuff
Monday, July 9, 12

29. Other: Use Compression
Using compression:
reduces data amount to be stored on disks
reduces data amount to be transferred when RS reading data not
from local replica
increases amount of CPU used, but CPU isn’t usually a bottleneck
Favor compression speed over compression ratio
SNAPPY is good
Use wisely:
e.g. avoid wasting CPU cycles on compressing images
compression can be configured on per CF basis, so storing
non-compressible data in separate CF sometimes helps
data blocks are uncompressed in memory, avoid this to cause OOME
note: when scanning (seeking data to return for scan) many data
blocks can be uncompressed even if none of the data will be
returned from those block
Monday, July 9, 12

30. Other: Use Monitoring
TBD
Ganglia, Cacti, other*, Just use it!
* http://sematext.com/spm/index.html
Monday, July 9, 12

31. Qs?
Sematext is hiring!
Monday, July 9, 12