Apache HBase 1.3.0 was released mid-January 2017 and ships with support for date-based tiered compaction and improvements in multiple areas, like write-ahead log (WAL), and a new RPC scheduler, among others. The release includes almost 1,700 resolved issues in total.
HBase is often used in time series applications, directly or through projects, such as OpenTSDB. In time series applications, data is usually written in sequential writes by the time of data arrival, and data is queried in limited time ranges based on look-back time windows, causing recently written data to be queried more often than an older one.
The date-based tiered compaction support shipped in HBase 1.3.0 is beneficial for this set of use cases, where data is infrequently deleted or updated and recent data is scanned more often than an older one.
Records time-to-live (TTL) can be easily enforced with this new compaction strategy; records that have reached the expiry time will be dropped, when compacting the existing store files into a single bigger store file.
