Remembering the Future

BigTable is a system for storing and managing very large amounts of structured data. Data is organized into tables with rows and columns, but unlike a traditional database system, the row/column space can be sparse. Row keys and values are arbitrary strings, and the system allows each row/column cell to store not just a single value but a set of values with associated timestamps, simplifying analyses that examine how values have changed over time. Data in a single table is internally broken at arbitrary row boundaries to form contiguous regions of data called tablets. These tablets are distributed across a large pool of worker machines. The system is designed to manage several petabytes of data distributed across thousands of machines, with very high update and read request rates coming from thousands of simultaneous clients.

Topics: Google | BigTable