Welcome to Apache HBase!

HBase is the Hadoop database. Think of it as a distributed, scalable, big data store.

When Would I Use HBase?

Use HBase when you need random, realtime 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, distributed, versioned, column-oriented store modeled after Google's Bigtable: A Distributed Storage 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 and HDFS.

Features

  • Linear and modular scalability.
  • Strictly consistent reads and writes.
  • Automatic and configurable sharding of tables
  • Automatic failover support between RegionServers.
  • Convenient base classes for backing Hadoop MapReduce jobs with HBase tables.
  • Easy to use Java API for client access.
  • Block cache and Bloom Filters for real-time queries.
  • Query predicate push down via server side Filters
  • 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

Where Can I Get More Information?

See the Architecture Overview, the Apache HBase Reference Guide FAQ, and the other documentation links on the left!

News

June 15th, 2012 Birds-of-a-feather in San Jose, day after Hadoop Summit

May 23rd, 2012 HackConAthon in Palo Alto

May 22nd, 2012 HBaseCon2012 in San Francisco

Old News