Apache HBase is the Data storage component on top of Hadoop using HDFS as the storage. HBase is non-relational (NoSQL) and distributed in nature and belongs to column family oriented database. It is good for random reads and batch operations. HBase is capable of handling large datasets with millions of rows and columns.

Apache HBase is modeled after Google’s Bigtable and is considered one of the best implementations of it in the industry and internally, it is a sorted map in implementation.

HBase has multiple APIs, the main one being the Java API. In addition to this, it also has the REST (for HTTP access) and Thrift (for other language programming access) APIs.

HBase is quite useful for handling use cases dealing with real-time data analysis; also, it is very good for real-time data monitoring. In our examples, we are using the 1.1.8 version of HBase.

For more details, refer to the Apache HBase documentation at http://hbase.apache.org/.