Bigtable: A Distributed Storage System for Structured Data

The Binary Breakdown

The article, “Bigtable: A Distributed Storage System for Structured Data,” describes a large-scale distributed data storage system developed at Google, capable of handling petabytes of data across thousands of servers. Bigtable uses a simple data model that allows clients to dynamically control data layout and format, making it suitable for various applications like web indexing, Google Earth, and Google Finance. The authors detail the system's implementation, including its use of Google File System (GFS) for data storage, Chubby for distributed locking, and SSTables for data organization. The article concludes by evaluating Bigtable's performance and scalability through various benchmarks and discusses how it is used in real Google products. https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//archive/bigtable-osdi06.pdf