HBase is the Hadoop database. Its an open-source, distributed, column-oriented store modeled after the Google paper, Bigtable: A Distributed Storage System for Structured Data by Chang et al. Just as Bigtable leverages the distributed data storage provided by the Google File System, HBase provides Bigtable-like capabilities on top of Hadoop. HBase's goal is the hosting of very large tables -- billions of rows X millions of columns -- atop clusters of commodity hardware. Try it if your plans for a data store run to big.
HBase: Bigtable-like structured storage for Hadoop HDFS Just as Google's [WWW] Bigtable leverages the distributed data storage provided by the [WWW] Google File System, HBase provides Bigtable-like capabilities on top of Hadoop Core. Data is organized into tables, rows and columns. An Iterator-like interface is available for scanning through a row range (and of course there is the ability to retrieve a column value for a specific key). Any particular column may have multiple versions for the same row key.