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...