Code Library

HBase was designed as an open source clone of Google’s BigTable, so unsurprisingly it has a very similar interface, and it relies on a clone of the Google File System called HDFS. It supports the same data structure of tables, row keys, column families, column names, timestamps, and cell values, though it is recommended that each table have no more than two or three families for performance reasons.

HBase is well integrated with the main Hadoop project, so it’s easy to write and read to the database from a MapReduce job running on the system. One thing to watch out for is that the latency on individual reads and writes can be comparatively slow, since it’s a distributed system and the operations will involve some network traffic. HBase is at its best when it’s accessed in a distributed fashion by many clients. If you’re doing serialized reads and writes you may need to think about a caching strategy.

Source of Information : Big data Glossary