by Angela Guess
Doug Henschen of Information Week reports that HBase is gaining prominence in the NoSQL market, and with good reason. He writes, “The Apache Hadoop Framework has many components, including the MapReduce distributed data-processing model, Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS), Pig data-flow language, and Hive distributed data warehouse. But the part stealing much of the attention these day–and arguably maturing most rapidly–is HBase. HBase is Hadoop’s NoSQL database. Patterned after Google BigTable, HBase is designed to provide fast, tabular access to the high-scale data stored on HDFS. High-profile companies including Facebook and StumbleUpon use HBase, and they’re part of a fast-growing community of contributors who are adding enterprise-grade reliability and performance upgrades at steady clip.”
Henschen goes on, “Why is HBase so important? First and foremost, it’s part of the Hadoop Framework, which is at the epicenter of a movement in which companies large and small are making use of unprecedented volumes and varieties of information to make data-driven decisions. Hadoop not only handles data measured by the tens or hundreds of terabytes or more, it can process textual information like social media streams, complex data like clickstreams and log files, and sparse data with inconsistent formatting. Most importantly, it does all this at low cost, powered by open source software running on highly scalable clusters of inexpensive, commodity X86 servers.”
photo credit: HBase
