SDForum Software Architecture & Modeling Event: Architecting Hypertable April 23, 2008

Architecting Hypertable: the world's most massively parallel high performance database platform -- and Open Source besides.

Hypertable is an open source, high performance, distributed database modeled after Google's Bigtable. It differs from traditional relational database technology in that the emphasis is on scalability as opposed to transaction support and table joining. Tables in Hypertable are sorted by a single primary key. However, tables can smoothly and cost-effectively scale to petabytes in size by leveraging a large cluster of commodity hardware. Hypertable is designed to run on top of an existing distributed file system such as the Hadoop DFS, GLusterFS, or the Kosmos File System (KFS). One of the top design objectives for this project has been optimum performance. To that end, the system is written almost entirely in C++, which differentiates it from other Bigtable-like efforts, such as HBase. We expect Hypertable to replace MySQL for much of Web 2.0 backend technology. In this presentation, Doug will give an architectural overview of Hypertable. He will describe some of the key design decisions and will highlight some of the places where Hypertable diverges from the system described in the Bigtable paper.

Presenter: Doug Judd - Principal Search Architect, local search provider Zvents, Inc.; & Lead Developer, Hypertable. Doug has over a decade of software engineering experience in the area of information retrieval. Early in his career he joined Verity, Inc. as an engineer where he helped build the core VDK developer toolkit. He subsequently moved on to Inktomi, Inc. where he spent five years in both engineering and management positions in the crawling and indexing group of the Web Search division.Most recently, Doug worked with Kosmix, Inc. where he built a distributed web crawler and scaled it to a billion documents. Doug earned a B.S. in Computer Science from U.C. Santa Barbara in 1992 and holds four patents in search technology.

Free to SDForum members; $15.00 for non-SDForum members.

Official Website: http://www.sdforum.org/SAMSIG