I think part of the issue might be that HBase is designed for lots of data. The architecture overview says that if you only have a few thousand or million rows,

I think part of the issue might be that HBase is designed for lots of data. The architecture overview says that if you only have a few thousand or million rows, then a relational database may be a better choice: http://hbase.apache.org/book/architecture.html#arch.overview.when http://hbase.apache.org/book/architecture.html#arch.overview... Even if you plan on scaling to billions of rows of data, it may be easier to start with something else that works well for smaller data sets.