Why HBase is column oriented database

Question

Hi,

I am new to learn Hbase and I am getting confuse with row oriented and column oriented database manner in Hbase. Can anyone put an explanation to this?

Answer 1

Hey,

Yes, Hbase is known to be a column oriented database (where the column data stay together), the data in HBase for a particular row stay together and the column data is spread and not together.

In HBase the cell data in a table is stored as a key-value pair where you can have any number of columns (keys), each of which has a value, which is stored in HDFS. column families allow you to host multiple key/value maps in the same row. Some of the factors that matters regarding column oriented are:

• Retrieval of a few columns from a table with many columns will be faster.
• Aggregate calculation of single column will be fast.