ApacheCon North America 2014

HBase is a distributed columnar store that provides elastic scalability and strong consistency. As its successful usage broadens, organizations build more applications with features that "the HBase core implementation" trades off in favor of flexibility and scalability. While HBase allows atomic multi-row operations within single region, there are many application use-cases that would benefit or could be simplified by the availability of global (cross-region, cross-table) transactions.

In this talk we will describe in detail a method for bringing global transaction support to HBase. We will explore how adding transactions can make use of HBase features like coprocessors and multi-version concurrency control, including a deep dive into the implementations. We will also examine some specific use-cases, which make use of transactional support to simplify solutions on HBase.