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HBase

HBase

Overview

What is HBase?

The Apache HBase project's goal is the hosting of very large tables -- billions of rows X millions of columns -- atop clusters of commodity hardware. Apache HBase is an open-source, distributed, versioned, non-relational database modeled after Google's Bigtable.

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Recent Reviews

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HBase has established itself as a crucial tool for various organizations, including PayPal, to store and retrieve records in near real …
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HBase

10 out of 10
September 13, 2017
Incentivized
HBase solves problems of scalability and management of multi-terabyte applications. It makes scaling to +1 nodes very easy, especially …
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Popular Features

View all 7 features
  • Availability (5)
    7.8
    78%
  • Security (5)
    7.8
    78%
  • Performance (5)
    7.1
    71%
  • Concurrency (5)
    7.0
    70%
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Pricing

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What is HBase?

The Apache HBase project's goal is the hosting of very large tables -- billions of rows X millions of columns -- atop clusters of commodity hardware. Apache HBase is an open-source, distributed, versioned, non-relational database modeled after Google's Bigtable.

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Product Demos

Apache Hbase Tutorial | Hadoop Hbase | Hbase Training | Intellipaat

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Features

NoSQL Databases

NoSQL databases are designed to be used across large distrusted systems. They are notably much more scalable and much faster and handling very large data loads than traditional relational databases.

7.7
Avg 8.8
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Product Details

HBase Technical Details

Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo

Frequently Asked Questions

The Apache HBase project's goal is the hosting of very large tables -- billions of rows X millions of columns -- atop clusters of commodity hardware. Apache HBase is an open-source, distributed, versioned, non-relational database modeled after Google's Bigtable.

Reviewers rate Scalability highest, with a score of 8.6.

The most common users of HBase are from Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(32)

Community Insights

TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!

HBase has established itself as a crucial tool for various organizations, including PayPal, to store and retrieve records in near real time. Users have found that HBase excels in analytical use cases by providing faster lookup of records with consistent reads and writes, making it ideal for handling large datasets. It allows for faster querying of records compared to other NoSQL databases, resulting in improved data access and analysis capabilities. The ease of installation and configuration, thanks to its integration with the HDP Hortonworks stack, is another advantage that users appreciate.

One significant use case for HBase is as a data store for streaming data ingested through mechanisms like Apache NiFi, Apache Storm, Apache Spark Streaming, Apache Flink, and Streaming Analytics Manager. This allows organizations to efficiently manage and process continuous streams of data. Furthermore, HBase's ability to store structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data without requiring a pre-defined schema makes it a versatile choice for a range of applications.

Customers across industries have leveraged HBase successfully for their specific needs. In the retail sector, it serves as a datastore for product catalogs, session management systems, and revenue-generating platforms. Additionally, businesses involved in advertising and location analytics rely on HBase to generate locational information efficiently. Its scalability and read performance with avro data containing geospatial information make HBase preferable over alternatives like Cassandra.

HBase also plays a vital role in managing data within Apache Hadoop systems. It is used to create master data sets and reconcile conflicting data. Moreover, HBase serves as a secondary layer of storage that consolidates updates from upstream key-value stores.

While users highly recommend HBase for its data model consistency, scalability, and well-documented features, they do acknowledge the operational overhead associated with deploying and managing clusters. Nonetheless, this does not overshadow the significant benefits that organizations derive from using HBase to solve scalability and management issues related to multi-terabyte applications.

HBase is recommended for handling huge amounts of data and integrating with other tools. Users find HBase to be a good choice for scenarios requiring streaming ingest, fast lookups, and processing massive datasets. Its integration capabilities with other tools make it a valuable asset for organizations dealing with vast amounts of data.

HBase is also highly regarded for its real-time reporting capabilities over big data and seamless integration with business intelligence (BI) tools. Users recommend HBase as a reliable NoSQL datastore specifically designed to handle big data loads. It serves as an effective solution for storing unstructured or semi-structured data while providing easy integration with frontend applications.

Another common recommendation is to consider HBase's native integration with Hadoop and other data access engines. Users find HBase helpful for storing and processing non-relational data efficiently. Additionally, they recommend it as a reliable option for data storage and provision to other applications, making it suitable for various use cases.

It is important to evaluate HBase when considering NoSQL databases, as it offers unique benefits such as amazing structured/unstructured data storage capabilities and support for parallel programming. Users suggest utilizing HBase for specific use cases where large amounts of similar data need to be stored and accessed easily.

Lastly, users emphasize the importance of proper data modeling and workload tuning for successful implementation of HBase. They advise against using HBase for full table scan workloads and suggest considering relational databases when applicable. Additionally, they encourage the use of HBase for OLAP and OLTP use cases, highlighting its suitability for handling huge datasets and analytical processing needs.

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-4 of 4)
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December 13, 2018

HBASE!!!

Anson Abraham | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
HBase is used as part of the company's main revenue generating platform. We're using it store data with usages of mapreduce, generates locational information for advertising business and location analytics. Storage wise, it made sense to use HBASE over Cassandra, as well as for read performance with avro data with geospatial information in the data
  • Excellent for read performance
  • Great store of file format of avro
  • Easy integration into mapreduce
  • Replication ability
  • Write performance
  • Performance support for parquet file format. supports, but performance wise still not there
  • API / library availability for spark, rather than creating a new library for it
NoSQL Databases (7)
60%
6.0
Performance
50%
5.0
Availability
50%
5.0
Concurrency
30%
3.0
Security
60%
6.0
Scalability
70%
7.0
Data model flexibility
80%
8.0
Deployment model flexibility
80%
8.0
It does depend on the use case scenario. It works really well if your schema doesn't really need relational features. It's really good for that. If you want to run as transactional, not a good idea. Relational analytics is not good for this, as well as edge network data. If you're using PB of data, then HBASE is best suited in this case as well.
  • Negative ROI has been on hardware usage. When used frequently, we have had constant disk failures. As a result, it requires HDD replacements.
  • But with disk failures, HA is available, however, to a certain extent.
  • Large datasets helped causality issues to be mitigated.
Cassandra os great for writes. But with large datasets, depending, not as great as HBASE. Cassandra does support parquet now. HBase still performance issues. Cassandra has use cases of being used as time series. HBase, it fails miserably. GeoSpatial data, Hbase does work to an extent. HA between the two are almost the same.
Hbase is open source. So will be using it in any case. If it was made into commercial product, strong possibility of not using HBase, and would probably use something else at that point, most likely Cassandra. HBase does scale, if done correctly, and will perform if used correctly. Would reocmmend to use.
Vinaybabu Raghunandha Naidu | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
HBase was used in my previous organization(PayPal) where we needed a database for storing and retrieving records in near real time. It was used within consumer analytics and other sub-teams. It supported our near real-time use analytical cases by proving a faster lookup of records with consistency reads/writes. Apart from that, helped in querying the records much faster than other NoSQL databases.
  • Faster lookup of records using the row keys. It helped to fetch thousands of records in a much faster way using the row keys
  • As it is a columnar data store, helped us to improve the query performance and aggregations
  • Sharding helps us to optimize the data storage and retrieval. HBase provides automatic or manually sharding of tables.
  • Dynamic addition of columns and column family helped us to modify the schema with ease.
  • Identified issues with Hmaster when handling a huge number of nodes
  • Cannot have multiple indexes as row key is the only column which could be indexed.
  • HBase does not support partial row keys which limit its query performance.
NoSQL Databases (7)
75.71428571428571%
7.6
Performance
80%
8.0
Availability
70%
7.0
Concurrency
80%
8.0
Security
60%
6.0
Scalability
60%
6.0
Data model flexibility
90%
9.0
Deployment model flexibility
90%
9.0
Hbase is well suited for large organizations with millions of operations performing on tables, real-time lookup of records in a table, range queries, random reads and writes and online analytics operations.

Hbase cannot be replaced for traditional databases as it cannot support all the features, CPU and memory intensive. Observed increased latency when using with MapReduce job joins.
  • It supports the near real-time use cases when integrated with Spark Streaming.
  • It helps to store huge volume of records with consistent reads/writes.
  • Maintenance is the pain point as it requires some maintenance and monitoring of regional servers and nodes
Compared NoSQL databases with traditional databases for faster retrieval and consistency. As MongoDB is a NoSQL supports dynamic fields, however, query performance is bad for aggregations and added maintenance. When compared with MySQL and Teradata, it could not scale up as fast as Hbase and added cost involved to it. HBase can be easily scalable to a huge volume of records, have a faster lookup and provides consistency
Compared to other MySQL databases Hbase provides better query results and dynamic in nature. It can be integrated to different computational engines like spark to support to real time use cases.
September 13, 2017

HBase

Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
ResellerIncentivized
HBase solves problems of scalability and management of multi-terabyte applications. It makes scaling to +1 nodes very easy, especially through Ambari. It is built with fault tolerance and availability in mind. You can use it on a single node but it shines on multi-node infrastructure. With high data access speed and resiliency, I wouldn't recommend any other NoSQL database for general use.
  • HBase data access and retrieval only gets better with larger scale.
  • Fault tolerance is built in, if you have unreliable hardware, HBase will make every effort to keep your data online.
  • Extremely fast key lookups and write throughput.
  • Multi-tenancy is still work in progress
  • Usability and beginner friendliness
  • It has a bad reputation of being complex
HBase typically fits well in low latency, tight SLA scenarios. It is not recommended to be used in situations where a relational database would fit better. So in essence, if you're trying to do a lot of analytical workloads or joins, HBase wouldn't fit so well. If primary key access is sufficient, then HBase is a good fit.
  • We were able to scale our application from 5TB running in a relational database to 20TB on top of HBase
  • Application availability was always high even with half of the nodes having hardware issues
  • HBase can be used with standard mechanical harddrive storage. There's no need for fancy SAN or NAS storage with HBase which is almost always expensive.
Typically, Cassandra is faster on reads and HBase is faster on writes. You use Cassandra when you want to use a website, HBase is just an overall good general use database engine. Cassandra has its own storage engine and HBase uses HDFS and all its benefits. MongoDB is typically also used in web development, it has a great support for JSON but it's been known for poor scalability. It also uses its own storage engine.
There's really not anything else out there that I've seen comparable for my use cases. HBase has never proven me wrong. Some companies align their whole business on HBase and are moving all of their infrastructure from other database engines to HBase. It's also open source and has a very collaborative community.
Rekha Joshi | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Apache HBase was used for mastering solutions, for creating master data sets and reconciling conflicting data coming to Apache Hadoop systems.
  • Apache HBase is a widely used java based distributed NoSQL environment on Apache Hadoop.
  • While there has been growing interest and efforts in in memory computing, there are investments on Apache Hadoop (or hadoop provider variants) across domains. So that is a large market.
  • I worked on HBase for applications which needed to provide strong consistency and interact with Apache Hadoop.
  • You could encounter issues like region is not online or NotServingException or region server going down, out of memory errors.
  • As HBase works with Zookeeper, care needs to be taken it is correctly set up. Most issues pertain usually to environment setup, configuration, shared load on system or maintenance.
  • The performance across workloads when evaluated against other NoSQL variants was not best in class, this is most times okay, but can be improved.
  • If you use Apache HBase, and want to upgrade it for some features then you might need to do a compatibility check against your Apache Hadoop and Apache HBase versions, there are dependency to think about.
  • The HBase master slave becomes the single point of failure, and may not be a preferred design.It is not highly available system.
  • Last I checked it did not have well tested easy integrations with Spark, and that can help.
The key questions I ask when choosing NoSQL distributed database:

  • What is the application's inherent need? Does this component fit well in the design?
  • Does it provide high data security?
  • How does it assure there is no data loss?
  • How can I make sure it is a highly available system, and no downtime for customer?
  • Does it give me the best linear scalability?
  • What kind of tuning parameters does it allow the user to configure?
  • How does it stack up against other NoSQL variants on features, scalability, ease of use/contribute to and maturity of product?
  • What throughput can it attain under different kinds of workloads?
  • Faster data insights
  • Better customer service
These days I use Apache Cassandra more for even more scalability, good performance under different kind of workloads, and for providing highly available systems. Apache Cassandra also has connectors for Hadoop, Spark, and Solr.

Both scalability and response times are reasonable in HBase once tuned correctly. I hear latest version of HBase 2.0 is even better! Needs to be evaluated.

However it entirely depends on projects and what are we trying to solve when making this decision.

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