HBase ia an open-source, distributed, column-oriented store modeled after Google's BigTable. HBase is the Hadoop database. Use it when you need random, realtime read/write access to your Big Data. Just as Bigtable leverages the distributed data storage provided by the Google File System, HBase provides Bigtable-like capabilities on top of Hadoop. HBase's goal is the hosting of very large tables -- billions of rows X millions of columns -- atop clusters of commodity hardware.