I've seen hbase used in production at a number of startups, and worked at one where it was used. It's very powerful and flexible, but it's also not like running any other database. Setting up Cassandra is like "java cassandra.jar". Setting up HBase is...someone's job for a while is going to be "running HBase".

Anyway, I'm talking about small-ish startups that aren't super researchy technological trailblazers. There are definitely people outside of microsoft (I'm assuming that's what you meant instead of Google as Google already had BigTable and HBase started out as a Powerset project and so ended up at Microsoft) running HBase in production.

I heard Flurry has something like 2k+ nodes. Though post Yahoo acquisition, who knows what's going on.

My company does quite unfortunately; we don't really have enough data to make it necessary and it was justified w/ vague notions of scaling blah blah blah.

Facebook, Salesforce, Google (just the HBase client APIs, though), Flurry (now Yahoo), Yahoo, Apple (Siri), Pinterest, Twitter, Rocketfuel, Huawai, SiftScience, just to name some.

I work at one of the above :) where we run many, many thousand HBase servers.

There is an interesting article about HBase vs Cassandra et al here: http://www.infoworld.com/article/3066358/analytics/hbase-the...

I cannot validate or refute any of it. Hoping some here can.

Hbase is approaching a decade of age. It is well understood, rock solid, and pretty much ever error is googleable. There are numerous companies that run it in production. Hbase may not get the press Cassandra does because of it is not as easy to setup due to some external dependencies (HDFS and Zookeeper). But its very much production ready for some epic data sets.

Facebook uses HBase pretty massively.

https://code.facebook.com/posts/321111638043166/hydrabase-th...

Google doesn't use HBase. Facebook does use it for Facebook Messages I believe.

It's used pretty extensively at Adobe.