[ANNOUNCE] Apache HBase 2.5.0 is now available for download

[Nick Dimiduk <nd...@apache.org>]

The HBase team is happy to announce the immediate availability of HBase
2.5.0.

Apache HBase™ is an open-source, distributed, versioned, non-relational
database.
Apache HBase gives you low latency random access to billions of rows with
millions of columns atop non-specialized hardware. To learn more about
HBase,
see https://hbase.apache.org/.

HBase 2.5.0 is the sixth minor release in the HBase 2.x line, which aims to
improve the stability and reliability of HBase. This release includes nearly
300 resolved issues not covered by previous 2.x releases.

Notable new features include:
- Several performance improvements to the on-heap and off-heap data path
- Several reliability and performance improvements to splitting and merging
- Several compaction improvements
- Overhaul of tracing based on OpenTelemetry
- A region size distribution visualization on the Master UI
- Expose the details of slow/large requests in Region Server UI
- Several improvements to the HBase shell, and jshell support with JDK11+
- Moved storage of meta region location out of ZooKeeper

The full list of issues can be found in the included CHANGES.md and
RELEASENOTES.md,
or via our issue tracker:

    https://s.apache.org/hbase-2.5.0-jira

To download please follow the links and instructions on our website:

    https://hbase.apache.org/downloads.html

Questions, comments, and problems are always welcome at:
dev@hbase.apache.org.

Thanks to all who contributed and made this release possible.

Cheers,
The HBase Dev Team