NoSQL databases were initially devised to support a few concrete extreme scale applications. Since the specificity and scale of the target systems justified the investment of manually crafting application code their limited query and indexing capabilities were not a major impediment. However, with a considerable number of mature alternatives now available there is an increasing willingness to use NoSQL databases in a wider and more diverse spectrum of applications and, to most of them, hand-crafted query code is not an enticing trade-off.In this paper we address this shortcoming of current NoSQL databases with an effective approach for executing SQL queries while preserving their scalability and schema flexibility. We show how a full-fledged SQL engine can be integrated atop of HBase leading to an ANSI SQL compliant database. Under a standard TPC-C workload our prototype scales linearly with the number of nodes in the system and outperforms a NoSQL TPC-C implementation optimized for HBase.