Nooooooooooooooooooooo! Seriously, no! Use mongoDB, PostgreSQL, even flat files if you must, but HBase?

We used it in production about 3-4 years ago and it was a nightmare from both usage and especially maintenance point. Fortunately we had a flat-files based backup system so we were able to rescue data every! Single! Time! the damn thing crashed and took (part of) data with it.

Of course, this is anecdotal evidence, and things might have changed from then, but I wouldn't touch it. Life is too short.

EDIT: Also, I am curious how the results in the above link would compare to aphyr's if he performed the test on HBase?

I see where you are coming from. HBase was unstable 3-4 years ago, but after a great amount of dev effort and battle hardening from Cloudera, Salesforce, etc., it is very stable now. We have ~ 400 nodes running in production for a very critical use case and have seen 0 data loss edge cases in the last 2 years, along with some of our servers running > 6 months without any reboots.

We use is in a very real time use case with latency requirements of single digit milliseconds, and if you tweak it the right way, you can the required performance from it, along with easy horizontal scaling.

Also, I am curious too for aphyr to take on HBase, but I don't think the result would be different since running Jepsen is straightfoward and not much to a person's interpretation. The results and further experiments are what aphyr does nicely.

Thanks for the info on HBase stability. I probably won't use it again (once burnt...), but if they really managed to pull their act together - good for them!