Preface

I got my start with HBase in the fall of 2008. It was a young project then, released only in the preceding year. As early releases go, it was quite capable, although not without its fair share of embarrassing warts. Not bad for an Apache subproject with fewer than 10 active committers to its name! That was the height of the NoSQL hype. The term NoSQL hadn’t even been presented yet but would come into common parlance over the next year. No one could articulate why the idea was important—only that it was important—and everyone in the open source data community was obsessed with this concept. The community was polarized, with people either bashing relational databases for their foolish rigidity or mocking these new technologies for their lack of sophistication.