Google Cloud Platform for Developers

Columns and column families

Bigtable columns are stored as unstructured byte arrays, meaning that there isn't any concept of a column type as seen in most other database technologies. For best performance, column values should be kept under 10 MB in size, with a combined size of 100 MB for all columns in a row. When it comes to modeling data in Bigtable, the rule of thumb is to keep all information relating to a given entity in a single, flattened, potentially very wide row. When performing this denormalization, keep in mind that rows cannot later be queried by column values.