Systems aren't designed in a vacuum. Each system reflects a long line of prior work. HBase is no exception. So where did HBase's developers draw their inspiration from?

In 2006, engineers at Google published a paper on a system they called Bigtable. It described the data model, semantics, and inner workings of a distributed database, which itself drew inspiration from a line of prior work, such as Chord, Tapestry, and C-Store.

Bigtable followed Google File System (GFS), the inspiration behind HDFS at Google, and was meant to offer record-level random read/write capabilities that were missing in GFS. Bigtable was initially used to serve workloads such as Google Analytics (for storing site metrics), and continues to be a popular storage choice at Google, despite newer systems, such as Spanner, that have been developed since then.

In 2007, engineers at a search startup called Powerset decided to draw from the material in Google's publication and build an open source rendition of Bigtable. HBase was initially structured as a contrib module within the Hadoop project, which at that time included the MapReduce framework and HDFS, the file system that HBase was and still is built on top of. In 2008, HBase became a full subproject of Hadoop and became a top-level Apache project in 2010.

Today, HBase is among the top five most popular and widely-deployed NoSQL databases. It is used to support critical production workloads across hundreds of organizations. It is supported by multiple vendors (in fact, it is one of the few databases that is multi vendor), and more importantly has an active and diverse developer and user community.