Accumulo. Application Development, Table Design, and Best Practices

Accumulo. Application Development, Table Design, and Best Practices

2015 • 532 pages

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Average rating4

15

It seems that most of the reviews (what few there are) are for the early release version. I only briefly looked over that version, but it seems to have come a long way since then.

This book is far from perfect, but as someone relatively new to Accumulo, I'm happy to have it. It covers a wide range of topics from installation/administration to table design.

The free documentation that comes with Accumulo is pretty good, and always getting better, but it's not really sufficient for someone who is just learning. In the cloud world it seems like everything is slated for HBase. It's hard to say if Accumulo will ever see the same kind of traction as HBase, but this book makes a good case as why it might.

The authors are people who know what they are talking about. Two of them (Mr. Cordova and Ms. Rinaldi) who have had a large hand it Accumulo's development. Meanwhile Mr. Wall is someone who brings perspective as a developer of applications using Accumulo.

This is probably the first textbook I've ever read cover to cover. It's pretty well organized to be done that way, though I suspect most people will simply look up topics of interest to them. I learned a lot from reading this book and will continue to refer back to it from time to time while using Accumulo at work.

This book offers a lot of breadth, at the cost of some depth. The further I get into Accumulo development, the more I'd like to learn about Table and Iterator design. Accumulo Iterators seem complicated enough that they could warrant a book by themselves. They cover some of the more popular table designs, and built in iterators but don't talk too much about custom design.

That will get you pretty far, but it doesn't really help when trying to customize applications to meet your customers needs. Things like query optimizations and how tune your design for performance are only lightly touched on.

Overall, I think this is a very good book on Accumulo that is a great compliment to the documentation for both new and experienced Accumulo developers. If you're working with Accumulo, this book is a must own.

November 25, 2015Report this review