Transforming relational database into HBase: A case study

With the development of distributed system and cloud computing, more and more applications might be migrated to the cloud to exploit its computing power and scalability, where the first task is data migration. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that transforms a relational database into HBase, which is an open-source distributed database similar to BigTable. Our method is comprised of two phases. In the first phase, relational schema is transformed into HBase schema based on the data model of HBase. We present three guidelines in this phase, which could be further utilized to develop an HBase application. In the second phase, relationships between two schémas are expressed as a set of nested schema mappings, which would be employed to create a set of queries or programs that transform the source relational data into the target representation automatically.