OStatic

HBase is the Hadoop database. Its an open-source, distributed, column-oriented store modeled after the Google paper, Bigtable: A Distributed Storeage System for Structured Data 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. HBase's modest goal is the hosting of very large tables -- billions of rows X millions of columns -- atop clusters of commodity hardware. Try it if your plans for a data store run to big. HBase is fully integrated with Hadoop's Map/Reduce system: HBase can act as either a source or a sink for a M/R job. The choice of Java allows HBase to integrate more tightly with Hadoop than others can - when we use HDFS, we don't need another process started to act as broker between the Java and C++ worlds nor do we have to cross the JNI "great divide". Also, because we use Java, we had a leg-up because a good part of our core types and functionality had already been written and debugged by an active community of "Smart Folks" over on the Hadoop Core project. HBase's short-term focus is on robustness, reliability and scalability. Once these goals have been addressed, HBase will shift its focus to performance.    [edit]