HBase differs from Hive in a number of ways. First, HBase is not a relational database. Unlike Hive, HBase does not support SQL-like queries, because SQL is a language for relational databases. Second, HBase does not have a metastore database. Instead, HBase is a nonrelational database based on Google's BigTable that works with HDFS for data storage and access. Third, HBase data is distributed to various nodes in regions, or to data blocks that store column-oriented chunks of related data. It is far easier to collect HBase evidence through HBase rather than collecting from each node due to the distributed nature of the data.

Given the complexity of carving out data from HFiles, collecting HBase evidence through the HBase interface has an advantage over a filesystem collection. HFiles are distributed file structures that need to be collected from each node. Once collected, HFiles must be carved in order to extract the column-oriented data and metadata and then convert...