"search technologies" entries

Coming full circle with Bigtable and HBase

The O'Reilly Data Show Podcast: Michael Stack on HBase past, present, and future.

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At least once a year, I sit down with Michael Stack, engineer at Cloudera, to get an update on Apache HBase and the annual user conference, HBasecon. Stack has a great perspective, as he has been part of HBase since its inception. As former project leader, he remains a key contributor and evangelist, and one of the organizers of HBasecon.

In the beginning: Search and Bigtable

During the latest episode of the O’Reilly Data Show Podcast, I decided to broaden our conversation to include the beginnings of the very popular Apache HBase project. Stack reminded me that in the early days much of the big data community in the SF Bay Area was centered around search technologies, such as HBase. In particular, HBase was inspired by work out of Google (Bigtable), and the early engineers had ties to projects out of the Internet Archive:

At the time, I was working at the Internet Archive, and I was working on crawlers and search. The Bigtable paper looked really interesting to us because the archive, as you know, we used to host — or still do — the Wayback Machine. The Wayback Machine is a picture of the Web that goes back to 1998, and you could look at the Web at any particular time. What pages looked liked at a particular time. Bigtable was very interesting at the Internet Archive because it had this time dimension.

A group had started up to talk about the possibility of implementing a Bigtable clone. It was centered at a place called Powerset, a startup that was in San Francisco back then. That was about doing a search, so I went and talked to them. They said, ‘Come on over and we’ll make a space for doing a Bigtable clone.’ They had a very intricate search pipeline, and it was based on early Amazon AWS, and every time they started up their pipeline, they’d get a phone call from Amazon saying, ‘Please stop whatever it is you’re doing.’ … The first engineer would be a fellow called Jim Kellerman. The actual first 30 classes came from Mike Cafarella. He was instrumental in getting the first versions of Hadoop going. He was hanging around Apache Nutch at the time. … Doug [Cutting] used to work at the Internet archive, and the first actual versions of Hadoop were run on racks at the Internet archive. Doug was working on fulltext search. Then he moved on to go to Yahoo, to work on Hadoop full time.

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