Transformation of an E-R Model into HBase Tables: A Data Store Design for IHE-XDS Document Registry

The distributed database HBase has become an effective solution of storing massive data. But there are still no standard methods of designing HBase tables from a conceptual model for an application. This paper presents a mechanism for transforming an E-R model into HBase tables. It defines four types of transforming processes for entities, one-to-one relationship, one-to-many relationship and many-to-many relationship respectively, and corresponding strategies for the organization of column families for more efficient queries. This mechanism was effectively applied to implement the Hbase based Document Registry for the Cross-Enterprise Document Exchange, a profile from Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise.