HBase is the Hadoop database (columnar). Use it when you need random, real time read/write access to your Big Data. This project's goal is the hosting of very large tables -- billions of rows X millions of columns -- atop clusters of commodity hardware.
HBase is an open source, non-relational, distributed,versioned, column-oriented database modeled after Google's Bigtable and is written in Java. Bigtable: A Distributed Storage System for Structured by Chang et al. Just as Bigtable leverages the distributed data storage provided by the Google File System, HBase provides Bigtable-like capabilities on top of Hadoop Distributed File System(HDFS). HBase includes: It is developed as part of Apache Software Foundation's Apache Hadoop project and runs on top of HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File System), providing Bigtable-like capabilities for Hadoop.
- Convenient base classes for backing Hadoop MapReduce jobs with HBase tables including cascading, hive and pig source and sink modules
- Query predicate push down via server side scan and get filters
- Optimizations for real time queries
- A Thrift gateway and a REST-ful Web service that supports XML, Protobuf, and binary data encoding options
- Extensible jruby-based (JIRB) shell
- Support for exporting metrics via the Hadoop metrics subsystem to files or Ganglia; or via JMX
