HBase support
HBase and Tablestore are both distributed NoSQL databases. To ensure compatibility with the HBase API, Tablestore provides the Tablestore HBase Client. This topic describes the differences between the two products in terms of features, software, and services.
Differences between Tablestore and HBase
Feature comparison
The following table compares the main features of Tablestore and HBase.
Dimension | Tablestore | HBase |
Data model | Wide Column | |
Data type | Multiple data types such as String and Integer | Uniformly binary bytes |
Client | Lightweight client with few dependencies | Heavyweight client with many dependencies |
Transport protocol | HTTPS | RPC |
Metering and billing | Reserved resources, pay-as-you-go | Reserved resources |
Service hosting | Fully managed | Semi-managed |
Multiple data versions | Support | Supported |
Data Lifecycle | Support | Support |
Transaction | Single-row transactions, transactions within a partition | Single-row transactions |
Index | No native index feature. Phoenix supports secondary indexes. | |
Real-time subscription | Not supported | |
Data analytics | Supports interactive analysis, such as search index statistical aggregation and SQL queries. | Not supported |
Integration with external computing services |
| Batch computing: Spark and MaxCompute |
Access control | Alibaba Cloud RAM/STS security account system | Kerberos, which is complex |
Data encryption | Encryption at rest, Bring-Your-Own-Key (BYOK) | None |
Load balancing | Automatically detects hot spot partitions to trigger partition splits and merges. | Simple policies trigger partition splits. |
Underlying storage | Pangu | HDFS |
Software and service comparison
Both Tablestore and HBase are modeled after Google's Bigtable, and their wide table data models are very similar. The main difference is that HBase is open source software, whereas Tablestore is a cloud service that is accessible through RESTful APIs. The main differences are as follows:
Dimension | Tablestore | Self-managed HBase cluster |
Cost | Billing is based on actual usage. Tablestore provides high-performance and storage-optimized instance types for different application scenarios. | Resources must be configured based on peak business traffic. Resources are idle during off-peak hours, which leads to high rental and manual operations and maintenance (O&M) costs. |
Security | Tablestore integrates with the Alibaba Cloud resource and permission management system. It supports multiple authentication and authorization mechanisms, such as RAM policies, instance policies, and network ACLs. Authorization is supported at the table and API levels. | Requires additional security mechanisms. |
Reliability | Data is automatically backed up using multiple replicas. Failover is also automatic. | You must ensure the availability of the cluster. |
Scalability | The automatic load balancing mechanism supports petabytes of data and millions of concurrent requests for a single table, which eliminates the need for manual scale-out. | When cluster utilization reaches a certain level, you must add or remove machines. This is a tedious process that can affect online services. |
HBase interface compatibility
HBase is a popular distributed NoSQL database. To ensure compatibility with the HBase API, Tablestore offers the Tablestore HBase Client. This client helps you easily migrate your applications from HBase to Tablestore.
Next steps
To learn more about the Tablestore HBase Client, see Introduction to Tablestore HBase Client and Quick Start for Tablestore HBase Client.
For more information about using the Tablestore HBase Client to read data from Tablestore, see Migrate from HBase Client to Tablestore HBase Client.
The Tablestore HBase Client has some differences from the native HBase API, even though its data model and features are similar to those of HBase. For more information about these differences, see Features supported by Tablestore HBase Client.
To ensure compatibility with HBase versions earlier than 1.0.0, see How to be compatible with versions earlier than HBase 1.0.
To migrate HBase data to Tablestore, you can also use the DataWorks data integration service or the DataX tool. For more information, see Data Integration Service and Synchronize data from HBase to Tablestore using DataX.