One of the questions I’m often asked – especially from a BI perspective – is how a BI person should look at HBase.  After all, HBase is often described quickly as an in-memory column store database – isn’t that what SSAS Tabular is?   Yet calling HBase an in-memory column store database isn’t quite right because in this case, the terms column, database, tables, and rows do not quite mean the same thing as one would think from a relational database aspect of things. Setting the Context How I usually start off is by providing a completely different context before I…