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Bigtable Practical Example

Can someone provide a real-world example of how data would be structured within a Bigtable? Please talk from a search engine, social networking or any other familiar point of view which illustrates clearly and pragmatically how the row -> column family -> column combo is superior to traditional normalized relational approaches.

Solution

  • Reading the original Google white paper was helpful:

    http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/labs.google.com/en//papers/bigtable-osdi06.pdf

    As was this comprehensive list of information sources on Google data architecture:

    http://highscalability.com/google-architecture

    Update: 11/4/14

    A new version of the Google white paper PDF can be found here:

    http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en/us/archive/bigtable-osdi06.pdf