Today marks a milestone for HBase. Its inaugural event sold out with about six hundred people in attendance.

Most events get 100 to 150 people in an inaugural event. But consider the circumstances and you can see why HBaseCon sold out and what it represents about the significance of this real-time database in the larger market:

• HBase represents the promise to connect the database to the application.
• Data scientists provide insights into the data to a small community.  HBase allows the application to drive insights to millions of people.
• Mike Hoskins of Pervasive Software calls HBase and Hadoop a discontinuous leap. “This is nor your father’s database.”
• Vionoy Goel of the Internet Archive made the point that HBase is a temporal database. It timestamps everything, meaning you can always do time series analysis.
• HBase raises questions about the importance of software. Is software merely an arbitrary skin for the data itself?
• HBase represents a leap away from relational databases.
• HBase provides a data layer on top of the metadata.
• In some respects, HBase delivers the promise of Hadoop by providing a real-time infrastructure.
• The shift to always hot data, always available for real-time applications with deep historical context. Think U.S. Government.

Some examples of what HBase needs to grow:

• A more diversified community of committers.
• Better performance. HBase should run much faster.
• More enterprise grade capabilities such as better security and backup.
• Better schema management.
• Additional language support.

This is just the beginning. We just had a conversation with Cloudera CEO Mike Olson who said that HBase is becoming one of the most significant workloads in Hadoop.

So that means just one thing. Expect double the number of attendees at the next HBaseCon.