Is there a good library for accessing HBase from Python?

You can try thrift python bindings but the project seems dead. I'd go with starting HBase REST server, and then using python standard libraries to access that RESTful web service.

FWIW, I'm trying to get something started at http://github.com/hammer/pyhbase. Totally a hack right now but will be polishing it over the next few weeks. I link to the Mozilla client that I started from.

Stargate is still in the contrib part of the Hbase project while ThriftServer is maintained in core(org.apache.hadoop.hbase.thrift). Grab the HBase.thrift file from the repository and run

thrift --gen py HBase.thrift on it, shove the contents into wherever, and startup a thrift server. Stargate is very very slow. The HBase thrift still has some work to be done on it, however it is still being actively worked on

A couple of places to get started

http://wiki.apache.org/hadoop/Hbase/ThriftApi

Also go through https://github.com/tousif/Hwrapper wrapper for the Hbase REST api.