HBase is the open-source implementation of Google's BigTable
architecture. It strives to scale to billions of rows and
millions of columns, all distributed across an inexpensive
cluster of commodity servers. HBase's primary storage system
is HDFS, Hadoop's distributed and replicated file system. In
addition HBase has a native interface to Hadoop's Map Reduce
framework which allows for easy development and subsequent
execution of batch jobs that can scan entire tables. HBase
fits into a new category of database systems often
summarized under the term "NoSQL" - or non-relational
databases. While there are quite a few system that comprise
the term they often only overlap marginally or have nothing
in common but the fact that they abandon traditional models
found in relational database system (RDBMS) for specialized
architectures that are built to solve a specific problem.
For HBase this is storing a virtually endless amount of data
while ensuring that write and read performance stays
constant, no matter how large the dataset is.