Google Cloud Platform in Action

Chapter 7. Cloud Bigtable: large-scale structured data

This chapter covers

• What is Bigtable? What went into its design?
• How to create Bigtable instances and clusters
• How to interact with your Bigtable data
• When is Bigtable a good fit?
• What’s the difference between Bigtable and HBase?

Over the years, the amount of data stored has been growing considerably. One reason is that businesses have become more interested in the history of data changes over time than in a snapshot at a single point. Storing every change to a given value takes up much more space that a single instance of a value. In addition, the cost of storing a single byte has dropped significantly. Following this practice has led to engineering projects focused on discovering more ...