March 2009 Hadoop Get Together Berlin #

Since last summer, newthinking store Berlin is hosting a Hadoop Meetup every quarter of the year. The scope of these user group meetings is not only on Hadoop projects but deals with technologies necessary with storing, processing and searching large amounts of data.

The meeting last Thursday featured a talk by Lars George on his experiences using HBase in customer projects as early as in 2007. His talk discussed his requirements for a distributed database. He then explained the basics of HBase and described his experiences using the software for customer projects. Bottom line for me is that although in a very early stage the project does provide a lot of value: Instead of re-implementing your own solution it is possible to benefit from the efforts of others. One thing I consider especially remarkable is the effort of the HBase community helping users in case they run into problems.

The second talk was from Jan Lehnardt on CouchDB. Jan explained the main design goals of the system. He detailed the architecture of CouchDB. Then he explained how Erlang made it possible to reach the goals in comparably short time.

The slides of the talks are both available online:

Lars George: HBase

Jan Lehnardt: CouchDB

The talks were followed by several questions and interesting discussions (with some beer in the Keyser Soze close by).

The next Get Together will be held in June 2009. Looking forward to see you in Berlin by then.