The origin of HBase

Looking at the limitations of GFS and MR, Google approached another solution, which not only uses GFS for data storage but it is also used for processing the smaller data files very efficiently. They called this new solution BigTable.

Note

BigTable is a distributed storage system for managing structured data that is designed to scale to a very large size: petabytes of data across thousands of commodity servers.

Welcome to the world of HBase, databases and the data access design from the keyvalue store databases where a key-based access to a specific cell of data is provided.

Note

In column-oriented databases, data grouped by columns and column values is stored contiguously on a disk. Such a design is highly I/O effective when dealing with very large data sets used for analytical queries where not all the columns are needed.

HBase can be defined as a sparse, distributed, persistent, multidimensional sorted map, which is indexed by a row key, column key, and timestamp. HBase is designed to run on a cluster of commodity hardware and stores both structured and semi-structured data. HBase has the ability to scale horizontally as you add more machines to the cluster.