HBase - An Introduction

With the advent of the Big data , we soon realized the limitation of Relation databases in handling the data .The need of the hour was to find a solution that can overcome the limitation of the RDBMS.
Hadoop has the capability to store and process huge amount of data and can become a good alternative for these RDBMS system.

HDFS cannot do the random reads very well .We need to scan the entire data set even for a small record set.

HBASE is a column oriented database that sits on the top of the Hadoop distributed file system.

• It has a low a latency and can be used for the frequent lookups in the database.
• The idea for HBase was inspired from the Google's Big table and it is written in Java.
• Insert ,Update and Delete like transaction capabilities are well supported by the HBase .
• Hbase also supports AVRO , Thrift and REST services. 
• It is good for a large amount of data and is highly scalable.
• It can be good for real time need also

HBase stores the data in a key,value pair and scan out a single records within billion of records in an efficient way.

Data is indexed as row key and the row key are automatically in a sorted manner.

Companies such as Google, Yahoo, Twitter uses Hbase.