Apache finally signs off Hadoop database... after 7 years of development

A completed first version of what’s been called the Hadoop Database has been released, seven years after work started.

HBase 1.0 was signed off on Tuesday by the Apache Software Foundation. The system has been built to work with different implementations of Hadoop.

Michael Stack, vice president of ASF HBase, welcomed the news, calling it a “major milestone” in the project’s lengthy development.

In a statement, Stack thanked an army of volunteers for producing “a thing of collaborative beauty that also happens to power key, large-scale internet platforms".

HBase is a non-relational, distributed database for Hadoop – itself written on the blueprint of Google’s MapReduce.

It runs atop Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) and is capable for crunching real-time, read-write access across billions of rows and millions of columns on clustered x86 servers.

Despite its pre-1.0 credentials, HBase can already be found in the engine rooms of Apple, Facebook Pinterest, Salesforce and Yahoo!.

Yahoo! – the development shop that nurtured Doug Cutting’s original Hadoop project – runs HBase on 3,000 servers. The web firm claims some of the world’s largest HBase clusters.

Yahoo!’s HBase lead development manager at ASF said in a statement the firm would scale individual HBase clusters to millions of regions using the stable version 1.0

Changes since HBase version 0.98.0 include improved performance and the ability to re-load subset server configs without taking the server offline. ®