This document provides an overview of HBase and why NoSQL databases like HBase were developed. It discusses how relational databases do not scale horizontally well with large amounts of data. HBase was created by Google to address these scaling issues and was inspired by their BigTable database. The document explains the HBase data model with rows, columns, and versions. It describes how data is stored physically in HFiles and served from memory and disks. Basic operations like put, get, and scan are also covered.