ASF Unveils Apache HBase v1.0

FOREST HILL, Md., Feb. 24 — The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of more than 350 Open Source projects and initiatives, announced today the availability of Apache HBase v1.0, the distributed, scalable, database for Apache Hadoop and HDFS.

“Apache HBase v1.0 marks a major milestone in the project’s development,” said Michael Stack, Vice President of Apache HBase. “It is a monumental moment that the army of contributors who have made this possible should all be proud of. The result is a thing of collaborative beauty that also happens to power key, large-scale Internet platforms.”

Dubbed the “Hadoop Database”, HBase is used on top of Apache Hadoop and HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File System) for random, real-time read/write access for Big Data (billions of rows X millions of columns) across clusters of commodity hardware. HBase is used by Apple, Facebook, FINRA, Flipboard, Flurry, Pinterest, RocketFuel, Salesforce, Xiaomi, and Yahoo!, among many other organizations.

Apache HBase has also fostered a healthy ecosystem of projects that run on top of it, such as Apache Phoenix, a SQL layer over HBase, and OpenTSDB, a time series database that uses HBase as its backing store.

“Medium- and high- scale services at hundreds of enterprises and some of the largest Internet companies today are backed by Apache HBase,” explained Andrew Purtell, member of the Apache HBase Project Management Committee. “Chances are when using your computer or mobile device you interact with a system built with HBase many times daily without ever knowing it. The HBase 1.0 release appropriately acknowledges a maturity already achieved by the Apache HBase community and software both, and is a great occasion to learn more about HBase, how it can help you solve your scale data challenges, and the growing ecosystem of Open Source and commercial software that chooses HBase as foundation.”

Apache HBase v1.0 is the result of 7 years of development, and reflects more than 1,500 changes and upgrades over the previous major release, Apache HBase 0.98.0. Notable new features include:

• Improved performance without sacrificing stability;
• Introduction of new APIs and reorganization of select client-side APIs;
• Read availability using timeline consistent region replicas for new availability guarantees;
• Online configuration change to enable reloading a subset of the server configuration without restarting the region servers; and
• New look, enhanced usability, and radically revamped documentation.