Hbase Reviews & Product Details

Hbase is used as a distributed wide-column database for storing and retrieving large datasets, especially where teams need fast access to data by key. Its use is often tied to Hadoop-based data processing.

What company sizes and industries is Hbase the best fit for?

Hbase is most often a fit for larger organizations, with positive users also represented in mid-market and small businesses. The industries with the strongest presence include:

Company size — Enterprise: The most prominent segment among positive users.
Company size — Mid-market: Also well represented.
Company size — Small business: Present among positive users as well.
Industry — Information technology and computer software: A recurring setting for Hbase use.
Industry — Banking and financial services: Commonly represented, often for large-scale data storage and processing.
Industry — Telecommunications: Another recurring use context.

How long does it take to implement Hbase across a team?

Implementation timelines vary, but 1–3 months is the most commonly reported time to go live. Other reported timelines span from less than a day to more than a year.

Time to go live	Relative frequency
1–3 months	Most common
Less than 1 month	Also reported
3–6 months	Also reported
More than 12 months	Less common
6–12 months	Less common
Less than 1 day	Less common

What customer support options does Hbase provide, and how do users find the overall support experience?

Hbase is an open-source project with community-oriented support; users value community knowledge and online resources, though support experiences can be uneven. Community help is useful for finding answers, while troubleshooting and resolving complex issues can take effort.

What is the experience like for teams switching to Hbase from another tool?

Teams have moved to Hbase when existing relational or other data stores could not handle their data volume, scaling needs, or performance requirements. The transition can bring faster access to large datasets and a closer fit with Hadoop-based workloads, but it also means adapting to a nonrelational model and a less familiar query approach. Prior systems include relational databases such as MySQL and PostgreSQL, as well as other NoSQL and data platforms.

What tools and platforms does Hbase integrate with, and how do these integrations help users get more value from the product?

Hbase is used with Hadoop ecosystem components and connected to query, analytics, and application layers. These connections let teams work with large datasets in their existing data pipelines and serve queried data to applications.

Hadoop and data processing: Hadoop, HDFS, MapReduce, and Spark.
Query and search: Hive, Apache Phoenix, Apache Solr, and Elasticsearch.
Application and data access: Java clients, REST APIs, and Kafka.
Reporting and visualization: Tableau and Banana.

What features or capabilities could make Hbase even more useful?

Hbase could be more approachable for teams that need to query, manage, and tune it. Recurring improvement areas include:

Querying: Provide a more intuitive, SQL-like query experience for common data operations.
Indexing and data access: Make it easier to index and query beyond the row key.
Cross-table operations: Add more direct support for joins and related relational-style operations.
Administration: Simplify setup, configuration, monitoring, and performance tuning.
Developer experience: Make the APIs, tools, and management interface easier to use.

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Milad N.

Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.)

5/21/2016

"Stable Database"

5/5

What do you like best about Hbase?

Stability and scalability are the most important features in this software which I like. I deployed it over more than 20 servers; it was easy to deploy and add new nodes. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Hbase?

I have a little issue with its REST web service and also Zookeeper sometimes crashes, but its native clients were great. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Timothy S.

Principal Developer Advocate

Enterprise (> 1000 emp.)

1/7/2016

"HBase"

5/5

What do you like best about Hbase?

HBase is part of the Hadoop stack makes it a no brainer for usage if you have a Hadoop cluster setup already. Running on top of your existing HDFS makes for an easy install and use. For most people using Hortonworks, Cloudera or MapR this is part of your default install. HBase works well with Apache Spark as well and makes for a great NOSQL solution for many use cases. It is very well documented and there's tons of articles on uses and tutorials. http://hbase.apache.org/book.html#jvm Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Hbase?

It could use a better query language. I would prefer if Phoenix was better integrated with HBase. Also they should include cell level security like Accumulo. Otherwise there's not much to dislike, it fits into the hadoop cluster and is easy to manage with Hue or Ambari. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering Hbase:

If you have Hadoop, install it through Ambari or your Hadoop console and give it a try. if you don't have Hadoop, I would say try something else. Try it for some use cases in place of another cache, kv store or NoSQL. If you already have Accumulo or Cassandra, then you probably don't have too many uses for HBase, but some OOTB solutions use it. It doesn't hurt to have it installed as it proves to be a useful utility for many options. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Hbase solving and how is that benefiting you?

We were using it to quickly access Key-Value type data for front-end applications. Basically a sampling of massive datasets stored in HDFS. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Anshorimuslim S.

Platform Developer

Information Technology and Services

Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.)

3/14/2016

"HBase for Big Data"

3.5/5

What do you like best about Hbase?

Low Latency, versioning row, consistency, Java API, interoperability with another software Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Hbase?

Tuning, compaction, configuration and settings Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Gerry E.

Senior Database Developer & Architect

Enterprise (> 1000 emp.)

6/16/2015

"HBase has proven to be a very robust, flexible and feature-rich distributed data store. "

5/5

What do you like best about Hbase?

- build from the ground up with strict consistency in mind, with the flexibility to relax the consistency level on an as-needed basis.

- easy to use shell provides both DML and DDL commands

- Java APIs are easy to use

- table and column family attributes can be customized per the use case

- built in auto-sharding capabilities

- replication is easy to setup and maintain

- native in-memory option

- native row versioning \ history capabilities

- fault-tolerant and self-healing

- plenty of good documentation, resources, blogs, etc Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Hbase?

- no known, full-featured, management GUI (stand-alone or web application) seems to exist at this time

- DDL and DML via shell is easy for simple operations, but becomes syntactically awkward for more complex operations Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Anil G.

Senior Software Developer

Internet

Enterprise (> 1000 emp.)

6/15/2015

"HBase is good for doing RangeScans, storing HistoricalData and providing Strong Consistency."

4.5/5

What do you like best about Hbase?

1. Highly Scalable.

2. Out of the box load balancing.

3. Doing short RangeScans

4. Support for Coprocessors(Server side UDF's)

5. Strong Consistency.

6. Rich set of Filters.

7. Support for storing historical data.

8. Deep Integration with Hadoop Platform.

9. Huge Community support.

10. Provides cell level security. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Hbase?

HBase needs to integrate with Apache Phoenix OOTB so that users don't need to bother about reading and writing byte[] to and from HBase. OR It should provide high level constructs to read and write columns with DataType (like int, bigdecimal, short, etc.). Its Documentation website can be improved and made more visual. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering Hbase:

Data Modeling is KEY to successful HBase implementation. Make sure you get it right. Tune HBase as per your workload. Avoid using HBase for full table scan type of workload. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Hbase solving and how is that benefiting you?

I have been using HBase for the last 4 years. I have used it for two different use cases:

1. To store credit card transactions in HBase at Intuit.

2. To store images of cars in HBase at Truecar.com

Here are the benefits:

1. It's strongly consistent.

2. Integrates very well with Hadoop/MapReduce.

3. RangeScan

4. Can be used to store small files in HDFS/Hadoop.

5. Good community support.

6. Support for storing historical data. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Anuroopa G.

Application Developer

Financial Services

Enterprise (> 1000 emp.)

6/15/2015

Business partner of the seller or seller's competitor, not included in G2 scores.

"Used the feature Hive-HBase integration"

3.5/5

What do you like best about Hbase?

Even though we cannot use it as a replacement of RDBMS, it suits a number of use cases in the Big Data space. In one among the use cases, the number of versions for HBase was kept as 1 (to simulate the RDBMS feature of maintaining only a single version, not the version history of 3 (default)) and used the feature Hive HBase integration to read the HBase table from Hive. So the application updates the HBase table, and we used this table in the ETL flow along with other Hive tables. Note: Even if the version is greater than 1, the Hive table which points to the HBase table displays only the latest version. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Hbase?

You need to monitor all the HBase daemons along with the other services in the ETL/Hadoop Cluster. And the rowkey definition should be done with utmost care, as the rowkey defines the performance of HBase. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Isaac Z.

Product Specialist

Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.)

1/7/2016

"HBase as storage is good for data Minning"

3.5/5

What do you like best about Hbase?

1. Highly Scalable.

2. Rich set of data type.

3. API support multiple language. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Hbase?

1. It is difficult to configure

2. Its Documentation website can be improved and made more visual. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Bharadwaj (Brad) C.

Director Of Engineering/Head of Reliability Engineering

Enterprise (> 1000 emp.)

6/10/2015

"An Amazing Experience"

5/5

What do you like best about Hbase?

HBase is the right DB for any non-relational usecase. HBase operations run in real-time on its database rather than MapReduce jobs. It scales linearly to support billions of rows with millions of columns. Reliable and Fast Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Hbase?

Difficult for people who are building custom tools for SQL like purposes to understand HBase. Cannot be used for transactional datasets Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Verified User in Higher Education

Enterprise (> 1000 emp.)

Originally submitted 4/14/2015

"HBase Database - The good and the bad"

4.5/5

What do you like best about Hbase?

It's really fast and quite reliable. We manually instilled multiple namenode failures but it still worked flawlessly. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Hbase?

People coming from traditional relational databases will have a hard time wrapping their heads around how HBase works. The lack of a stronger query language might cause other people to not use it. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering Hbase:

Keep in mind that it's an OpenSource project. So support is only through email lists. Also, it's not a RDBMS. So don't try to use it like one. It'll hurt more than it'll help. Try to denormalize your existing data if you are switching from an RDBMS.

Also, if you have good hardware and want better support, try using the Cloudera or Hortonworks distribution. I have experience with the Cloudera distribution and the Apache one as well. As far as I know, Cloudera's is free for smaller clusters. Also, it's very easy to install it that way. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Hbase solving and how is that benefiting you?

We found out that while serving content through HBase it's fault tolerance was very handy. We killed multiple namenodes and it kept serving. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Will H.

Founder

Design

Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.)

1/13/2016

Business partner of the seller or seller's competitor, not included in G2 scores.

"Awesome"

4/5

What do you like best about Hbase?

The speed. The complexity. The money saved. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Hbase?

The configuration. The arbitrality of parameters. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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Shashank Sah

•

Last activity over 6 years ago

In HBase, we cannot implement any cross data operations and joining operations, of course, we can implement the joining operations using MapReduce, which would take a lot of time to designing and development. How we can improve this??

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What do you recommend for organizations considering Hbase for their database management needs?

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