HBase is the Hadoop database. Think of it as a distributed scalable Big Data store.
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 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.
HBase provides:
See the Architecture Overview, the Apache HBase Book FAQ, and the other documentation links on the left!
May 22nd, HBaseCon2012 in San Francisco
January 19th, Meetup @ EBay
November 29th, Developer Pow-Wow in SF at Salesforce HQ
November 7th, HBase Meetup in NYC (6PM) at the AppNexus office
August 22nd, HBase Hackathon (11AM) and Meetup (6PM) at FB in PA
June 30th, HBase Contributor Day, the day after the Hadoop Summit hosted by Y!
June 8th, HBase Hackathon in Berlin to coincide with Berlin Buzzwords
May 19th, HBase 0.90.3 released. Download it!
April 12th, HBase 0.90.2 released. Download it!