Accumulo

Chapter 10. Internals

This chapter describes the internal workings of Accumulo. Although Accumulo can be used without a knowledge of its internals, developing an increased understanding of how Accumulo works will make it easier to understand and make decisions about how best to interact with Accumulo.

Tablet Server

Accumulo tables are split into contiguous ranges called tablets. Each tablet is assigned to a tablet server, also known as a tserver, that is responsible for all reads and writes for the tablet. Each tablet server can be assigned hundreds or even thousands of tablets. If an Accumulo instance reaches well over 1,000 tablets per server, it is time to start making adjustments: merging tablets, deleting old data, rethinking the table design, or increasing the size of the cluster.

An Accumulo instance typically runs one tablet server per slave node (for example, each server that is running an HDFS DataNode). A tablet server registers with an Accumulo instance by obtaining a lock in ZooKeeper. If a tablet server loses or is unable to monitor its lock, it will kill itself. It is important for Accumulo to be able to keep track of properly functioning tablet servers and to automatically shut down unresponsive tablet servers in order to ensure that a tablet is never assigned to more than one tablet server. ZooKeeper locks assist this process.

The following sections describe many of the operations tablet servers perform on their tablets.

Discussion of Log-Structured Merge Tree ...