Comparing functional differences between RDBMs and HBase

Lately, we are hearing about NoSQL databases such as HBase, so let's just understand what actually HBase has and lacks in comparison to conventional relational databases that have existed for so long now. The following table differentiates it well:

Relational database

HBase

This supports scale up. In other words, when more disk and memory processing power is needed, we need to upgrade it to a more powerful server.

This supports scale out. In other words, when more disk and memory processing power is needed, we need not upgrade the server. However, we need to add new servers to the cluster.

This uses SQL queries for reading records from tables.

This uses APIs and MapReduce for accessing ...

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