Google Cloud Platform for Architects

Support for ACID properties

BigTable only supports ACID properties at the raw level. Recall that ACID stands for Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, and Durability, which is transaction support as provided by a traditional RDBMS. Any operations you carry out that affect a particular row ID will either affect all of the columns corresponding to that column or none. But, this only extends as far as a single row is concerned. Updates to multiple rows are not atomic as the worldview of the columnar data store is restricted to groups of data with the same row ID:

Traditional RDBMS	Bigtable
Data arranged in rows and columns	Data arranged in columns
Supports SQL	NoSQL database with its own syntax
Complex queries such as grouping, ...