HBase is the Hadoop database. Its an open-source, distributed, column-oriented store modeled after the Google paper, Bigtable: A Distributed Storeage System for Structured Data by Chang et al. Just as Bigtable leverages the distributed data storage provided by the Google File System, HBase provides Bigtable-like capabilities on top of Hadoop.

HBase's goal is the hosting of very large tables -- billions of rows X millions of columns -- atop clusters of commodity hardward. Try it if your plans for a data store run to big.