Cloud Bigtable

In the last lesson, we looked at the ways to store unstructured data using Cloud Storage. From this lesson, we will look at the databases which stores structured data. And first in the line is BigTable. So, let’s start.

Introduction

If the data is analytical and you want to have low latency and frequent updates to the data, then Bigtable is the appropriate database choice. Bigtable is a fully managed, scalable NoSQL database service for large analytical and operational workloads.

Cloud Bigtable is a sparsely populated table that can scale to billions of rows and thousands of columns, enabling you to store terabytes or even petabytes of data.

A single value in each row is indexed; this value is known as the row key. Cloud Bigtable is ideal for storing very large amounts of single-keyed data with very low latency. It supports high read and writes throughput at low latency, and it is an ideal data source for MapReduce operations.

Storage model

Things to note while understanding the storage model of Bigtable is, empty values do not take any space and a cell can have multiple values in it.

• The table is composed of rows, each of which typically describes a single entity and columns. Columns contain individual values for each row.

• Columns that are related to one another are typically grouped together into a column family. Each column is identified by a combination of the column family and a column qualifier, which is a unique name within the column family.

Let’s take the example of a social network for example Instagram. If we want to track who is following who for a set of people the table will look as following.