Apache Accumulo is based on Google's BigTable design and is built on top of Apache Hadoop, Zookeeper, and Thrift. Apache Accumulo features a few novel improvements on the BigTable design in the form of cell-based access control and a server-side programming mechanism that can modify key/value pairs at various points in the data management process. Other notable improvements and feature are outlined here.

Google published the design of BigTable in 2006. Several other open source projects have implemented aspects of this design including HBase, Hypertable, and Cassandra. Accumulo began its development in 2008 and joined the Apache community in 2011.