Hbase v/s cloumn-oriented Databases

HBase is  not a a cloumn-oriented database in a typical RDBMS sense,but utilizes an on-disk column storage format
HBase excels at providing a key-based access to a specific cell of data,or sequential range of cells while the column-oriented databases excel at providing real time analytical access to data

Storage Models

Column-Oriented

  • Data in columnar model is kept in column
  • Data in columns are almost homogeneous thus fits for compression
  • Aggregation functions are very fast since entire column can be fetched very quickly
  • Inserts,updates are significantly slower and because of this reason the column-oriented databases suits best for OLAP scenario

Key-Value

  • Data is stored in a set of distributed maps
  • No bias towards aggregate or row-based processing performance and therefore no bias towards either OLAP or OLTP applicability.

A HBase  table can be represented using A Data Structure as

'rowkey1' => {
    'c:col1' => 'value1',
    'c:col2' => 'value2',
},
'rowkey2' => {
    'c:col1' => 'value10',
    'c:col3' => 'value3'
}