title: Using Solr to Query HBase
body: <p>I have a data warehousing problem, needing to query over a large dataset.   For the sake of this example lets say a typical state would have 30 million users with activity stats for each.  Ideally I could buy a data warehousing tool (Vertica, Infobright, etc...) but that's not in the cards or the budget.  </p>
  
  <p>Right now I'm considering using Solr to query HBase. While I believe HBase could scale up to the needs, I worry about Solr.  It's optimized as a search engine, i.e. the first pages of results return before the last and there's no support for something like a database cursor.  Tests so far have shown that getting a large result set out of Solr have been slower than I would've liked.  For instance comparing a query that would retrieve half of the available users (one which ultimately returned 500 mb of data) in the community version of Infobright finished in under a minute, for Solr it took 12 minutes. </p>
  
  <p>Is there something other than Solr that's better suited to query this data?  Are there any optimizations that would help with bulk data input and output? </p>