BigTable: Introduction

Google's crawlers were producing billions of web pages, and each page needed several old versions kept alongside the newest one. No commercial database could handle that scale without an enormous cost. That gap is where BigTable began. This lesson introduces BigTable, and its main use cases.

Goal

Design a distributed, scalable system that stores a huge amount of structured data. The data is indexed by a row key, the value that identifies each row. Each row can hold its own, unbounded number of columns.

What is BigTable?

BigTable is a distributed, massively scalable wide-column store