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Introduction

Actionbase is a database for serving user interactions. It is designed to serve interaction-driven data in real time and is production-proven across Kakao services.

Actionbase serves interaction-derived data—likes, recent views, follows, reactions—in real time.

An interaction is modeled as: who did what to which target.

Actionbase materializes read-optimized structures at write time. Reads use bounded access patterns (GET, COUNT, SCAN) without expensive computation.

When backed by HBase, Actionbase inherits durability and horizontal scalability.

Focuses onExplicitly avoids
Real-time user interactions (likes, views, follows)General-purpose graph queries
Bounded access patterns (GET, COUNT, SCAN)Unbounded traversal or analytics
Continuous writes, immediate readsBatch ingestion or deferred indexing
WAL/CDC to Kafka (yours or ours)Owning downstream processing
Pluggable storage (HBase now, others planned)Building yet another storage engine

Actionbase currently uses HBase as its primary storage backend. Lighter backends are planned for smaller deployments.

Used at Kakao services—primarily KakaoTalk Gift—handling over a million requests per minute. Running in stable production for years.