Apache Phoenix is an open source, massively parallel, relational database engine supporting OLTP for Hadoop using Apache HBase as its backing store.

Phoenix provides a JDBC driver that hides the intricacies of the NoSQL store enabling users to create, delete, and alter SQL tables, views, indexes, and sequences; insert and delete rows singly and in bulk; and query data through SQL.

[1] Phoenix compiles queries and other statements into native NoSQL store APIs rather than using MapReduce enabling the building of low latency applications on top of NoSQL stores.

[2] Phoenix began as an internal project by the company salesforce.com out of a need to support a higher level, well understood, SQL language.

It was originally open-sourced on GitHub[3] on 28 Jan 2014 and became a top-level Apache project on 22 May 2014.