Cloud Bigtable is Google's NoSQL wide-column database service similar in use case to Hadoop's HBase. It serves as the database that powers many core Google services such as Search, Analytics, Maps, and Gmail. It is a compressed, high performance, and proprietary data storage system built on top of a few Google technologies such as the Google File System, Chubby Lock Service, and SSTable.
Google describes Bigtable as a sparsely populated table that can scale to billions of rows and thousands of columns. Bigtable was designed to support applications requiring massive scalability and was intended to be used with petabytes of data. The database was designed to be deployed on clustered systems and uses a simple data model, which is the wide column store.
Data is assembled in order by row key, which is a single value in each row, and indexing of the map is arranged...