In Hadoop, I can easily create Map/Reduce apps which access and process data in huge text files and csv files. My question is can Hbase do the same and access such huge files, or HBase has other uses?
Hbase runs queries just as relational databases; so, I kind of have a hard time to understand the advantage of HBase, unless it can access huge text and csv files just as Hadoop does.
First of all Hbase is just a store. And a store never accesses anything. Rather you access the store to fetch or put the data. Like any other datastore Hbase has only one job to do, store your data and make it available to you whenever you need it. You can write MapReduce jobs or sequential Java programs etc etc to put data into Hbase or fetch data from it. It’s totally upto you which path you prefer.
Coming to the second part of your question, Hbase never ever works like traditional relational databases. Everything, starting from storing the data to accessing the data, is totally different. The advantage of using Hbase is that you can store really really huge amount of data into it and have random read/write access. The data can be of any type viz. text, csv, tsv, binary etc etc. But, before going ahead, you must think well whether Hbase is a suitable choice for you or not, as one size doesn’t fit all.
HTH