NoSQL for Mere Mortals®

9. Introduction to Column Family Databases

“The family is one of nature’s masterpieces.”

—GEORGE SANTAYANAPHILOSOPHER

Topics Covered In This Chapter

In the Beginning, There Was Google BigTable

Differences and Similarities to Key-Value and Document Databases

Architectures Used in Column Family Databases

When to Use Column Family Databases

Deciding what is Big Data or a large database is somewhat subjective. Are a million rows in a MySQL table a large database? To some it is, to others it is just an average, perhaps even small, table. There is little room for debate, however, when you start to get into the realm of billions of rows and tens of thousands of columns in a table. That is a very large database (VLDB) by any standard.

Relational databases ...