View source for File:Marten-klencke-thesis.pdf

This paper describes the issues that arise when, and also the benefits that come from, rebuilding an existing, relational database-based web application, to run on top of a distributed, column-oriented data store. The research was done by porting a MySQL-based Wiki software called Wikka to HBase while carefully analyzing the necessary steps and caveats associated with this work. We tested the scalability properties of the resulting software on a dedicated compute cluster using custom benchmarking software as well as a previously developed framework called WikiBench. The end result is proof of the (read) scalability of such a system and a set of rules and guidelines for any similar porting effort.