What is hbase?

Apache HBase is a database designed to store and retrieve very large amounts of data spread across many computers at once. Unlike a typical relational database that organizes data in rows and columns the way a spreadsheet does, HBase uses a column-oriented structure that is optimized for quickly reading or writing specific pieces of data even when the total dataset is enormous, think billions of rows. HBase was modeled after a system called Bigtable, which Google described in a research paper in 2006. Where Bigtable was built on top of Google's internal file system, HBase runs on top of Apache Hadoop, an open-source framework for distributed storage. If you already use Hadoop to store and process large datasets, HBase can sit on top of that infrastructure and give you fast, random read and write access to that data. One distinctive feature of HBase is that it keeps multiple versions of each piece of data. Every time a cell is updated, the previous value is retained alongside the new one, so you can read historical states of your data without needing to design that versioning yourself. HBase is used in production at large organizations where the scale of data exceeds what a single relational database can hold. Common use cases include storing event logs, user activity records, time-series data, and other datasets that grow very quickly. The project is part of the Apache Software Foundation and is released under the Apache 2.0 license. Getting started documentation and downloads are available on the project website.