InfoQ: Hypertable Lead Discusses Hadoop and Distributed Databases

InfoQ: Hypertable Lead Discusses Hadoop and Distributed Databases: "1. How would you describe Hypertable to someone first hearing about it?
Hypertable is an open source, high performance, scalable database, modeled after Google's Bigtable. Over the past several years, Google has built three key pieces of scalable computing infrastructure designed to run on clusters of commodity PCs. The first piece of infrastructure is the Google File System (GFS) which is a highly available filesystem that provides a global namespace. It achieves high availability by replicating file data inter-machine (and inter-rack), which makes it impervious to a whole class of hardware failures that traditional file and storage systems aren't, including failures of power supplies, memory, and network ports. The second piece of infrastructure is a computation framework called Map-Reduce that works closely with the GFS to allow you to efficiently process the massive amount of data that you have collected. The third piece of infrastructure is something called Bigtable, which is analogous to a traditional database. It allows you to organize massive amounts of data by some primary key and efficiently query the data. Hypertable is an open source implementation of Bigtable with improvements where we see fit."