• 👉 Overview
• 👀 What ?
• 🧐 Why ?
• ⛏️ How ?
• ⏳ When ?
• ⚙️ Technical Explanations
• 🖇️ References

👉 Overview

👀 What ?

Google Cloud Platform's (GCP) Bigtable is a scalable, fully-managed NoSQL wide-column database that is suitable for both real-time access and analytics workloads. It can handle massive workloads at consistent low latency and high throughput, making Bigtable ideal for large operational and analytical applications, including IoT, user analytics, and financial data analysis.

🧐 Why ?

Bigtable provides incredible scalability and performance, with each table capable of scaling up to billions of rows and thousands of columns, allowing you to store petabytes of data. It's designed to handle high write and read loads, and it's also highly flexible, offering both native time series support and wide-column data model. These features make Bigtable an important tool for businesses dealing with huge amounts of data, in need of both real-time access and the ability to perform complex analytics.

⛏️ How ?

To use GCP Bigtable, first, you need to create a Bigtable instance in the Google Cloud Console, then create a table. Once the table is created, you can use the Cloud Bigtable APIs to read and write data. Google provides client libraries for the most popular programming languages, which greatly simplifies the process of interacting with Bigtable. When designing your schema, it's important to understand that Bigtable is a sparse, distributed, persistent multidimensional sorted map, which means that the order of the rows and the order of the columns matter.

⏳ When ?

Google launched Cloud Bigtable as a public service in 2015. However, it has been used internally by Google for more than a decade to power services like Search, Analytics, Maps, and Gmail.

⚙️ Technical Explanations

At its core, Cloud Bigtable is built on three Google technologies: Bigtable, a distributed storage system for managing structured data; SSTable, a persistent, ordered immutable map from keys to values; and Chubby, a distributed lock service. Bigtable is essentially a multi-level map that's indexed by a row key, column key, and a timestamp; each value in the map is an uninterpreted array of bytes. This unique architecture allows Bigtable to handle massive amounts of data across distributed clusters, while its APIs and client libraries provide simple and flexible methods for interacting with that data.

🖇️ References