Question: Database Advice

I want to connect Maple to a database with around 10 000 time series.
I have played around with Microsoft Access, SQL Server and MySQL.
However, none of them seems to be up to the task.

One of the problems that I had was that the connection (tcp-ip) between
Maple and the database was very slow also the databases them self did not
handle the large amount of data very well. Maples database
examples are not very helpful either. They only show "cute" examples
with a couple of observations. What I need is scale and efficiency. I am trying
to determind if this is douable or not.

I have been looking at Apache HBase which seams to be up to the task.
Both Maple and HBase is written in java (I think) so they should integrate nicely?!

How long time would it take to load a return matrix with 10 000 columns into
Maple from a database?