Differences between HDFS & HBase

• HBase provides low latency access to small amounts of data within large data sets while HDFS provides high latency operations.
• HBase supports random read and writes while HDFS supports WORM (Write once Read Many or Multiple times).
• HDFS is basically or primarily accessed through MapReduce jobs while HBase is accessed through shell commands, Java API, REST, Avro or Thrift API.

HDFS stores large data sets in a distributed environment and leverages batch processing on that data. 

While HBase stores data in a column oriented manner where each column is stored together so that, reading becomes faster leveraging real time processing. 

Hadoop is basically 3 things, a FS (Hadoop Distributed File System), a computation framework (MapReduce) and a management bridge (Yet Another Resource Negotiator). HDFS allows you store huge amounts of data in a distributed (provides faster read/write access) and redundant (provides better availability) manner. And MapReduce allows you to process this huge data in a distributed and parallel manner. But MapReduce is not limited to just HDFS. Being a FS, HDFS lacks the random read/write capability. It is good for sequential data access. And this is where HBase comes into picture. It is a NoSQL database that runs on top your Hadoop cluster and provides you random real-time read/write access to your data.

You can store both structured and unstructured data in Hadoop, and HBase as well. Both of them provide you multiple mechanisms to access the data, like the shell and other APIs. And, HBase stores data as key/value pairs in a columnar fashion while HDFS stores data as flat files. Some of the salient features of both the systems are :

Hadoop

1. Optimized for streaming access of large files.
2. Follows write-once read-many ideology.
3. Doesn't support random read/write.

HBase

1. Stores key/value pairs in columnar fashion (columns are clubbed together as column families).
2. Provides low latency access to small amounts of data from within a large data set.
3. Provides flexible data model.

Hadoop is most suited for offline batch-processing kinda stuff while HBase is used when you have real-time needs.

An analogous comparison would be between MySQL and Ext4.

Hadoop uses distributed file system i.e HDFS for storing bigdata.But there are certain Limitations of HDFS and Inorder to overcome these limitations, NoSQL databases such as HBase,Cassandra and Mongodb came into existence.

Hadoop can perform only batch processing, and data will be accessed only in a sequential manner. That means one has to search the entire dataset even for the simplest of jobs.A huge dataset when processed results in another huge data set, which should also be processed sequentially. At this point, a new solution is needed to access any point of data in a single unit of time (random access).

Like all other FileSystems, HDFS provides us storage, but in a fault tolerant manner with high throughput and lower risk of data loss(because of the replication).But, being a File System , HDFS lacks random read and write access. This is where HBase comes into picture. It’s a distributed, scalable, big data store, modelled after Google’s BigTable. Cassandra is somewhat similar to hbase.