NSA proposes Accumulo NoSQL database to Apache

Built on top of Apache's Hadoop, Zookeeper and Thrift projects, Accumulo is a distributed key/value store based on the design of Google's BigTable. Developed by the US National Security Agency (NSA), the Accumulo project has now been proposed to the Apache Software Foundation for consideration and incubation as a new Apache project. Accumulo's big difference is that it has fine-grained label-based access control, which could allow different users to access a record but only see the fields they are allowed to see; the NSA developers believe such a database could work in "government, health care, and other industries where privacy is a concern".

According to the proposal, Accumulo already has hundreds of developers using it and has been in development since early 2008; there are now over 200,000 lines of, mostly Java, code and "100s of pages of documentation". The NSA says in the proposal that the project has been handled, internally, as an open source project, using common tools such as Maven and many other libraries. Although no documentation is currently available on the web, the developers hope to present a paper on YCSB results for the database at the 2011 ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing.

(djwm)