Item: Apache HBase
Rating: 10
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with HBase

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros and Cons

Pros

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.

Cons

Multi-tenancy is still work in progress
Usability and beginner friendliness
It has a bad reputation of being complex

Return on Investment

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.

Alternatives Considered

Cassandra and MongoDB

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.

Other Software Used

Apache Hadoop, Apache Hive, Apache Pig, Apache Spark

Likelihood to Renew

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

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