Apache HBase

Apache HBase is an open-source database that is distributed, versioned and column-oriented, modeled on the Bigtable design described in a paper by Chang and colleagues at Google. Bigtable relies on the Google File System, and in the same way HBase delivers comparable capabilities on top of Apache Hadoop and its distributed file system.

It is intended for storing very large tables across a cluster, with rows indexed by key and columns grouped into families. The project documentation includes a Reference Guide with a quick start section, downloads on the project site, and mailing lists plus a Slack channel for discussion. The code is written in Java.

HBase is an Apache Software Foundation project under the Apache-2.0 license and is deployed on your own Hadoop-based clusters, though several cloud providers also bundle it in managed big data offerings. It suits data engineering teams that need low-latency random access to large datasets.