HBase features compression, in-memory operation, and Bloom filters on a per-column basis as outlined in the original Bigtable paper.[2] Tables in HBase can serve as the input and output for MapReduce jobs run in Hadoop, and may be accessed through the Java API but also through REST, Avro or Thrift gateway APIs. HBase is a wide-column store and has been widely adopted because of its lineage with Hadoop and HDFS. HBase runs on top of HDFS and is well-suited for fast read and write operations on large datasets with high throughput and low input/output latency.
HBase is now serving several data-driven websites[3] but Facebook's Messaging Platform migrated from HBase to MyRocks in 2018.[4][5] Unlike relational and traditional databases, HBase does not support SQL scripting; instead the equivalent is written in Java, employing similarity with a MapReduce application.
In the parlance of Eric Brewer's CAP Theorem, HBase is a CP type system.[6]
History
Apache HBase began as a project by the company Powerset out of a need to process massive amounts of data for the purposes of natural-language search. Since 2010 it is a top-level Apache project.
Facebook elected to implement its new messaging platform using HBase in November 2010, but migrated away from HBase in 2018.[4]
The 2.5.x series is the current stable release line, it supersedes earlier release lines.
Use cases & production deployments
Enterprises that use HBase
The following is a list of notable enterprises that have used or are using HBase:
