I would be happy to speak a bit at the meetup regarding Mozilla's use
of HBase and Riak.
I'll start with links to some HBase documentation / articles that I've
found very useful.  I'll make another post today or tomorrow with some
Riak links.

= HBase =
== General Links ==
* [http://hbase.apache.org/ Main Site]
* [http://hbase.apache.org/docs/current/api/overview-
summary.html#overview_description Getting Started / API Docs]
* IRC Channel (very active, very helpful) - irc.freenode.net #hbase
== Introduction / Overview ==
* [http://files.meetup.com/1228907/NYC%20Hadoop%20Meetup%20-
%20Introduction%20to%20HBase.pdf Introduction to HBase]
* [http://www.larsgeorge.com/search/label/hbase Lars George's blog]
** [http://www.larsgeorge.com/2010/01/hbase-architecture-101-write-
ahead-log.html WAL]
** [http://www.larsgeorge.com/2009/10/hbase-architecture-101-
storage.html Storage]
** [http://www.larsgeorge.com/2009/05/hbase-mapreduce-101-part-i.html
MapReduce]
== Mozilla Specific Links ==
* [https://wiki.mozilla.org/Socorro:Overview Socorro 2.0 Overview]
* [http://code.google.com/p/socorro/source/browse/trunk/socorro/hbase/
hbaseClient.py Socorro HBase Client Code]
* [http://blog.mozilla.com/data/2010/05/18/riak-and-cassandra-and-
hbase-oh-my/ Blog post mentioning HBase+Riak]

Correct me if I'm wrong, Daniel, but Hbase is modeled after Google's
Big Table, right?

Would it be too ambitious to pare this meetup down to just Hbase and
assign the Big Table Paper ---
http://nosqlsummer.org/paper/google-bigtable --- for required reading?

Mark

Anyone who hasn't read the bigtable whitepaper already should be
ashamed. :)
Labs.google.com/papers/bigtable.html

That sounds like a good plan. I'll talk a bit about the goods and bads
of
HBase and mention some of the comparative differences.  There is one
more
really good comparison link I want to give.