Apache HBase is an open source distributed data-store capable of managing billions of rows of semi-structured data across large clusters of commodity hardware. HBase provides real-time random read-write access as well as integration with Hadoop MapReduce, Hive, and Pig for batch analysis. In this talk, Todd will provide an introduction to the capabilities and characteristics of HBase, comparing and contrasting it with traditional database systems. He will also introduce its architecture and data model, and present some example use cases.