Concurrency Control

Multi-version Concurrency Control (MVCC)

The system uses Multi-Version Concurrency Control (MVCC) and by default will auto-assign revision numbers using a timestamp.

Storage Architecture

Disk-oriented

Hypertable is capable of running on top of any filesystem. To achieve this, the system has abstracted the interface to the filesystem by sending all filesystem requests through a File System (FS) broker process. FS brokers have been developed for HDFS, MapR, Ceph, KFS, and local (for running on top of a local filesystem).

Checkpoints

Consistent

Hypertable backup by output table data in random order.

Storage Model

Custom

Data Model

Column Family / Wide-Column

Hypertable uses a set of related columns known as a column family. Users may supply an optional column qualifier and specify the qualified column as family:qualifier.

System Architecture

Shared-Disk

The diagram below provides a high-level overview of the Hypertable system followed by a brief description of each system component.

Hyperspace - This is Hypertable's equivalent to Google's Chubby service. Hyperspace is a lock manager and provides a filesystem for storing small amounts of metadata.

Master - The master handles all meta operations such as creating and deleting tables. The master is also responsible for detecting range server failures and re-assigning ranges if necessary.

Range Server - Range servers are responsible for managing ranges of table data, handling all reading and writing of data.

FS Broker - Hypertable is capable of running on top of any filesystem. To achieve this, the system has abstracted the interface to the filesystem by sending all filesystem requests through a File System (FS) broker process. The FS broker provides a normalized filesystem interface and translates normalized filesystem requests into native filesystem requests and vice-versa. FS brokers have been developed for HDFS, MapR, Ceph, KFS, and local (for running on top of a local filesystem).

ThriftBroker - Provides an interface for applications written in any high-level language to communicate with Hypertable. The ThriftBroker is implemented with Apache Thrift and provides bindings for applications written in Java, PHP, Ruby, Python, Perl, and C++.

Joins

Not Supported

Isolation Levels

Snapshot Isolation

Timestamp is used internally to provide snapshot isolation for queries.

Storage Organization

Sorted Files

Stored Procedures

Not Supported

Query Interface

Custom API Command-line / Shell

The Hypertable Query Language (HQL) allows you to create, modify, and query tables and invoke administrative commands. HQL is interpreted by the following interfaces: - The hypertable command line interface (ht shell), - The hql_exec and hql_query Thrift API methods, - The Hypertable::HqlInterpreter C++ class.