Welcome to HBase!

November 19th 2010, Hadoop HUG in London is all about HBase

November 15-19th 2010, Devoxx features HBase Training and multiple HBase presentations

October 12th 2010, HBase-related presentations by core contributors and users at Hadoop World 2010

October 11th 2010, HUG-NYC: HBase User Group NYC Edition (Night before Hadoop World)

October 5th, 2010: HBase 0.89.20100924, the third in our series of 'developer preview' releases, is now available; Download!. See HBase Versions for more on this developer series of releases.

August 9th, 2010: HBase 0.89.20100726, the second in our series of 'developer preview' releases, is now available; Download!. See HBase Versions for more on this developer series of releases.

July 30th, 2010: HBase 0.20.6 released; Download!

June 25th, 2010: HBase 0.89.20100621, the first in a series of 'developer preview' releases, is now available; Download!. See HBase Versions for more on this developer series of releases.

June 24th, 2010: HBase 0.20.5 released; Download!

June 30th, HBase Contributor Workshop (Day after Hadoop Summit)

May 10th, 2010: HBase graduates from Hadoop sub-project to Apache Top Level Project

Old news...

HBase is the Hadoop database. Use it when you need random, realtime read/write access to your Big Data. This project's goal is the hosting of very large tables -- billions of rows X millions of columns -- atop clusters of commodity hardware.

HBase is an open-source, distributed, versioned, column-oriented store modeled after Google' Bigtable: A Distributed Storage System for Structured Data by Chang et al. Just as Bigtable leverages the distributed data storage provided by the Google File System, HBase provides Bigtable-like capabilities on top of Hadoop. HBase includes:

• Convenient base classes for backing Hadoop MapReduce jobs with HBase tables
• Query predicate push down via server side scan and get filters
• Optimizations for real time queries
• A high performance Thrift gateway
• A REST-ful Web service gateway that supports XML, Protobuf, and binary data encoding options
• Cascading, hive, and pig source and sink modules
• Extensible jruby-based (JIRB) shell
• Support for exporting metrics via the Hadoop metrics subsystem to files or Ganglia; or via JMX

HBase 0.20 has greatly improved on its predecessors:

• No HBase single point of failure
• Rolling restart for configuration changes and minor upgrades
• Random access performance on par with open source relational databases such as MySQL

Start by installing HBase on a single machine or a very small cluster.

1. Learn about HBase by reading the documentation.
2. Download HBase from the release page.

HBase is an open source volunteer project under the Apache Software Foundation. It is a subproject of Hadoop. We encourage you to learn about the project and contribute your expertise. Here are some starter links:

1. See our How to Contribute to HBase page.
2. Give us feedback: What can we do better?
3. Join the mailing list: Meet the community.
4. Get the latest at up on the hbase blog.
5. Come hang with us on IRC.
6. Become an HBase Fan up on facebook.
7. Or up on twitter, HBase.