Intro

• No-SQL database that can support billions of rows and millions of columns
• Part of Hadoop ecosystem, typically built on top of HDFS
• Supports real-time read/write random access and scales to very large datasets across many machines (serves Facebook's messaging platform)
• Column-oriented, data is stored by columns physically
• Row key uniquely locates a row, like an index, only one index per table. Row keys are alphabetically sorted. 11 comes before 2