Storing Data in Bigtables
A Bigtable has tables just like an RDBMS does, but unlike an RDBMS, a Bigtable tables generally don’t have relationships with other tables. Instead, complex data is grouped into a single table.
A table in a Bigtable consists of groups of columns, called column families, and a row key. These together enable fast lookup of a single record of data held in a Bigtable.
Using row keys
Every row needs to be uniquely identified. This is where a row key comes in. A row key is a unique string used to reference a single record in a Bigtable. You can think of them as being akin to a primary key or like a social security number for Bigtables.
Many Bigtables don’t provide good secondary indexes (indexes over column values themselves), so designing a row key that enables fast lookup of records is crucial to ensuring good performance.
A well‐designed row key allows a record to be located without having to have your application read and check the applicability of each record yourself. It’s faster for the database to do this.
Row keys are also used by most Bigtables to evenly distribute records between servers. A poorly designed row key will lead to one server in your database cluster receiving more load (requests) than the other servers, slowing user‐visible performance of your whole database service.
Creating column families
A column family is a logical grouping of columns. Although Bigtables allow you to vary the number of columns supported in any table definition at runtime, you must specify the allowed column families up front. These typically can’t be modified without taking the server offline. As an example, an address book application may use one family for Home Address. This could contain the columns Address Line 1, Address Line 2, Area, City, County, State, Country, and Zip Code.
Not all addresses will have data in all the fields. For example, Address Line 2, Area, and County may often be blank. On the other hand, you may have data only in Address Line 1 and Zip Code. These two examples are both fine in the same Home Address column family.
Having varying numbers of columns has its drawbacks. If you want to HBase, for example, to list all columns within a particular family, you must iterate over all rows to get the complete list of columns! So, you need to keep track of your data model in your application with a Bigtable clone to avoid this performance penalty.
Each value within a column can typically store different versions. These versions are referenced by using a timestamp value.
Values are never modified — a different value is added with a different timestamp. To delete a value, you add a tombstone marker to the value, which basically is flagging that the value is deleted at a particular point in time.
All values for the same row key and column family are stored together, which means that all lookups or version decisions are taken in a single place where all the relevant data resides.
Handling binary values
In Bigtables, values are simply byte arrays. For example, they can be text, numbers, or even images. What you store in them is up to you.
Only a few Bigtable clones support value‐typing. Hypertable, for example, allows you to set types and add secondary indexes to values. Cassandra also allows you to define types for values, but its range‐query indexes (less‐than and greater‐than operations for each data type) are limited to speeding up key lookup operations, not value comparison operations.