Hadoop-Hive-HBase Advice for Web Analytics

Hive, as you mentioned, has high latency for queries. It can be pointed at HBase (see https://cwiki.apache.org/Hive/hbaseintegration.html), but the integration results in HBase having tables that are forced into a mostly-rectangular, relational-like schema that is not optimal for HBase. Plus, the overhead of doing it is extremely costly- hive queries against hbase are, on my cluster, at least an order of magnitude slower than against plain HDFS files.

One good strategy is to store the raw metrics in HBase or on plain HDFS (Might want to look at Flume if these metrics are coming from log files) and run periodic MapReduce jobs (even every 5 minutes) to create pre-aggregated results that you can store in plain rectangular files that you can query through Hive. When you are just reading a file and Hive doesn't have to do anything fancy (e.g. sorting, joining, etc), then Hive is actually reasonably low latency- it doesn't run MapReduce, it just streams the file's contents out to you.

Finally, another option is to use something like Storm (which runs on Hadoop) to collect and analyze data in real time, and store the results for querying as mentioned above, or storing them in HBase for display through a custom user interface that queries HBase directly.