Alternatives to scalding for HBase access from Scala (or Java)
You may be interested in the Kiji project (https://github.com/kijiproject/). It provides a "schema-ed" layer on top of HBase.
It also has a Scalding adapter (KijiExpress) so that you can do functional collections operations (map, groupby, etc.) on "pipes" of tuples sourced from these schema-ed HBase tables.