Acknowledgments

Working on this book has been a humbling reminder that we, as users, stand on the shoulders of giants. HBase and Hadoop couldn’t exist if not for those papers published by Google nearly a decade ago. HBase wouldn’t exist if not for the many individuals who picked up those papers and used them as inspiration to solve their own challenges. To every HBase and Hadoop contributor, past and present: we thank you. We’re especially grateful to the HBase committers. They continue to devote their time and effort to one of the most state-of-the-art data technologies in existence. Even more amazing, they give away the fruit of that effort to the wider community. Thank you.

This book would not have been possible without the entire HBase community. HBase enjoys one of the largest, most active, and most welcoming user communities in NoSQL. Our thanks to everyone who asks questions on the mailing list and who answers them in kind. Your welcome and willingness to answer questions encouraged us to get involved in the first place. Your unabashed readiness to post questions and ask for help is the foundation for much of the material we distill and clarify in this book. We hope to return the favor by expanding awareness of and the audience for HBase.

We’d like to thank specifically the many HBase committers and community members who helped us through this process. Special thanks to Michael Stack, Lars George, Josh Patterson, and Andrew Purtell for the encouragement and the reminders of the value a user’s guide to HBase could bring to the community. Ian Varley, Jonathan Hsieh, and Omer Trajman contributed in the form of ideas and feedback. The chapter on OpenTSDB and the section on asynchbase were thoroughly reviewed by Benoît Sigoure; thank you for your code and your comments. And thanks to Michael for contributing the foreword to our book and to Lars for penning the letter to the HBase community.

We’d also like to thank our respective employers (Cloudera, Inc., and The Climate Corporation) not just for being supportive but also for providing encouragement, without which finishing the manuscript would not have been possible.

At Manning, we thank our editors Renae Gregoire and Susanna Kline. You saw us through from a rocky start to the successful completion of this book. We hope your other projects aren’t as exciting as ours! Thanks also to our technical editor Mark Henry Ryan and our technical proofreaders Jerry Kuch and Kristine Kuch.

The following peer reviewers read the manuscript at various stages of its development and we would like to thank them for their insightful feedback: Aaron Colcord, Adam Kawa, Andy Kirsch, Bobby Abraham, Bruno Dumon, Charles Pyle, Cristofer Weber, Daniel Bretoi, Gianluca Righetto, Ian Varley, John Griffin, Jonathan Miller, Keith Kim, Kenneth DeLong, Lars Francke, Lars Hofhansl, Paul Stusiak, Philipp K. Janert, Robert J. Berger, Ryan Cox, Steve Loughran, Suraj Varma, Trey Spiva, and Vinod Panicker.

Last but not the least—no project is complete without recognition of family and friends, because such a project can’t be completed without the support of loved ones. Thank you all for your support and patience throughout this adventure.