ElephantDB is a database that specializes in exporting key/value data from Hadoop. ElephantDB is composed of two components. The first is a library that is used in MapReduce jobs for creating an indexed key/value dataset that is stored on a distributed filesystem. The second component is a daemon that can download a subset of a dataset and serve it in a read-only, random-access fashion. A group of machines working together to serve a full dataset is called a ring.

Since ElephantDB server doesn't support random writes, it is almost laughingly simple. Once the server loads up its subset of the data, it does very little. This leads to ElephantDB being rock-solid in production, since there's almost no moving parts.

ElephantDB server has a Thrift interface, so any language can make reads from it. The database itself is implemented in Clojure.

An ElephantDB datastore contains a fixed number of shards of a "Local Persistence". ElephantDB's local persistence engine is pluggable, and ElephantDB comes bundled with local persistence implementations for Berkeley DB Java Edition and LevelDB. On the MapReduce side, each reducer creates or updates a single shard into the DFS, and on the server side, each server serves a subset of the shards.

ElephantDB support hot-swapping so that a live server can be updated with a new set of shards without downtime.

Google group: elephantdb-user

Introduction to ElephantDB

TODO: Write an updated tutorial for ElephantDB 0.4.x

ElephantDB is hosted at Clojars. Clojars is a maven repo that is trivially easy to use with maven or leiningen. You should use this dependency when using ElephantDB within your MapReduce jobs to create ElephantDB datastores. ElephantDB contains a module elephantdb-cascading which allows you to easily create datastores from your Cascading workflows. elephantdb-cascalog is available for use with Cascalog >= 1.10.1.

TODO: Documentation on how to deploy ElephantDB.

TODO: Documentation on how to run ElephantDB