After almost seven years of careful development and nurturing, the Apache Software Foundation has finally signed off on the first stable release of HBase 1.0, which is often more simply referred to as the Hadoop Database.

The release of HBase 1.0, which has been built to work with various different flavors of Hadoop, was described as a “major milestone” by Michael Stack, vice president of ASF HBase. Stack paid tribute to the army of volunteers who contributed to HBase 1.0’s code, saying they had helped to create “a thing of collaborative beauty that also happens to power key, large-scale internet platforms”.

HBase 1.0 is designed to run atop of Apache Hadoop and the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) in order to provide random, real-time read/write access to Big Data that’s stored on clusters of commodity hardware. Despite the fact version 1.0 has only just been released, the database is already used by some of the Web’s largest companies, including Apple Inc., Facebook Inc., and Yahoo! Inc., to name just a few.

Yahoo!, which is credited with nurturing the original Hadoop project, claims some of the world’s largest HBase clusters running on over 3,000 servers.

“HBase is an integral part of our technology stack powering numerous critical offstage processing use cases across our business in online advertising, search, communication, content personalization and targeting, and social, mobile and emerging products,” said Francis Liu, Development Lead for Apache HBase at Yahoo.

Liu added that Yahoo! would now scale individual HBase clusters to millions of regions using the stable version 1.0

New features in the release include the usual performance improvements, the ability to re-load subset server configs without taking the server offline, read availability using timeline consistent region replicas for new availability guarantees, and revamped documentation.