HBase guy chiming in. Sharding in HBase is a bit different than the other NoSQL guys. HBase is super fast when doing random lookups and scans, so the developer

HBase guy chiming in. Sharding in HBase is a bit different than the other NoSQL guys. HBase is super fast when doing random lookups and scans, so the developer is in complete control of his failure or success, depending on the row key design. Good thing about HBase is that it's designed to hold a massive amount of data, I've seen people with hundreds of thousands of columns on a single row, it's pretty remarkable.