We’re proud to announce that Cloudera’s Distribution for Hadoop Version 2 (CDH2) is officially released.

We’ve come a long way to get to a production quality release. At the beginning of September we announced the first beta of CDH2. After 6 months of additional testing we announced a release candidate. The release candidate spent over a month hardening in Cloudera’s internal QA process and on a wide variety of customer clusters. CDH2 is now stable and ready for use – we are pleased to recommend it to all our production users.

CDH2 is based on Apache Hadoop 0.20 – a release that has been available for almost a year. During this time, the Apache Hadoop community has produced hundreds of bug fixes, improvements and features. Cloudera is proud to have contributed many of these and incorporated them into CDH2.  For more information, please review the following resources:

In September 2009, we announced the first release of CDH2, our current testing repository. Packages in our testing repository are recommended for people who want more features and are willing to upgrade as bugs are worked out. Our testing packages pass unit and functional tests but will not have the same “soak time” as our stable packages. A testing release represents a work in progress that will eventually be promoted to stable. It’s a long road of feedback, bug fixes, QA and testing to move from testing to stable. As someone who tracks the maturity of a testing build throughout its life cycle, I’m pleased to say we’ve put a lot of polish into this release.
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At the beginning of September, we announced the first release of CDH2, our current testing repository. Packages in our testing repository are recommended for people who want more features and are willing to upgrade as bugs are worked out. Our testing packages pass unit and functional tests but will not have the same “soak time” as our stable packages. A testing release represents a work in progress that will eventually be promoted to stable.

We plan on pushing new packages into the testing repository every 3 to 6 weeks.  And it just so happens it is just about 3 weeks after we announced the first testing release. So it must be time for a new one. Here are some of the highlights:

One of the more common requests we receive from the community is to package HBase with Cloudera’s Distribution for Hadoop. Lately, I’ve been doing a lot of work on making Cloudera’s packages easy to use, and recently, the HBase team has pitched in to help us deliver compatible HBase packages. We’re pretty excited about this, and we’re looking forward to your feedback. A big thanks to Andrew Purtell, a Senior Architect at TrendMicro and HBase Contributor, for leading this packaging project and providing this guest blog post. -Chad Metcalf

What is HBase?
HBase is an open-source, distributed, column-oriented store modeled after Google’s Bigtable large scale structured data storage system. You can read Google’s Bigtable paper here.

“Bigtable is a distributed storage system for managing structured data that is designed to scale to a very large size: petabytes of data across thousands of commodity servers. Many projects at Google store data in Bigtable, including web indexing, Google Earth, and Google Finance. These applications place very different demands on Bigtable, both in terms of data size (from URLs to web pages to satellite imagery) and latency requirements (from back end bulk processing to real-time data serving). Despite these varied demands, Bigtable has successfully provided a flexible, high-performance solution for all of these Google products.”