Introducing Hypertable, an open source, distributed database that’s modeled after Google’s Bigtable, but available for anyone to use. Scale databases to meet any need.
Traditional database technology such as MySQL works well so long as your data fits on a single machine. As soon as your data exceeds the capacity of a single machine, the problem gets exponentially more difficult. Hypertable is an open source, distributed database, specifically designed to overcome this scaling barrier. It is modeled after Google’s Bigtable, which has been successfully deployed at Google for several years and underpins many of their major services.
This technology was designed to be massively scalable and to that end, certain traditional database features were sacrificed, most notably transactions and table joining. Though lack of support for these features makes Hypertable unsuitable for certain classes of applications, such as financial applications, there is a large set of Web applications in which this technology is well suited.
System Overview
The Hypertable data model consists of a multi-dimensional table of information that can be queried using a single primary key. The first dimension of the table is the row key. The row key is the primary key and defines the order in which the table data is physically stored. The second dimension is the column family. This dimension is somewhat analogous to a traditional database column. The third dimension is the column qualifier.
Within each column family, there can be a theoretically infinite number of qualified instances. For example if we were building a URL tagging service, we might define column families content, url, and tag. Within the “tag” column family there could…
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