July 27, 2021
Here is the paper.
Reading a paper related to bigtable is my favorite project to work on. I like to use blogger as my reader.
Bigtable: A Distributed Storage System for Structured Data
Abstract
Bigtable is a distributed storage system for managing structured data that is designed to scale to a very large size: petabytes of data across thousands of commodity servers. Many projects at Google store data in Bigtable, including web indexing, Google Earth, and Google Finance. These applications place very different demands on Bigtable, both in terms of data size (from URLs to web pages to satellite imagery) and latency requirements (from backend bulk processing to real-time data serving). Despite these varied demands, Bigtable has successfully provided a fexible, high-performance solution for all of these Google products. In this paper we describe the simple data model provided by Bigtable, which gives clients dynamic control over data layout and format, and we describe the design and implementation of Bigtable.
1. Introduction
Over the last two and a half years we have designed, implemented, and deployed a distributed storage system for managing structured data at Google called Bigtable. Bigtable is designed to reliably scale to petabytes of data and thousands of machines. Bigtable has achieved several goals: wide applicability, scalability, high performance, and high availability. Bigtable is used by more than sixty Google products and projects, including Google Analytics, Google Finance, Orkut, Personalized Search, Writely, and Google Earth. These products use Bigtable for a variety of demanding workloads, which range from throughput-oriented batch-processing jobs to latency-sensitive serving of data to end users. The Bigtable clusters used by these products span a wide range of configurations, from a handful to thousands of servers, and store up to several hundred terabytes of data. In many ways, Bigtable resembles a database: it shares many implementation strategies with databases. Parallel databases [14] and main-memory databases [13] have achieved scalability and high performance, but Bigtable provides a different interface than such systems. Bigtable does not support a full relational data model; instead, it provides clients with a simple data model that supports dynamic control over data layout and format, and allows clients to reason about the locality properties of the data represented in the underlying storage. Data is indexed using row and column names that can be arbitrary strings. Bigtable also treats data as uninterpreted strings, although clients often serialize various forms of structured and semi-structured data into these strings. Clients can control the locality of their data through careful choices in their schemas. Finally, Bigtable schema parameters let clients dynamically control whether to serve data out of memory or from disk.
Section 2 describes the data model in more detail, and Section 3 provides an overview of the client API. Section 4 briefly describes the underlying Google infrastructure on which Bigtable depends. Section 5 describes the fundamentals of the Bigtable implementation, and Section 6 describes some of the refinements that we made to improve Bigtable's performance. Section 7 provides measurements of Bigtable's performance. We describe several examples of how Bigtable is used at Google in Section 8, and discuss some lessons we learned in designing and supporting Bigtable in Section 9. Finally, Section 10 describes related work, and Section 11 presents our conclusions.
2. Data model
A Bigtable is a sparse, distributed, persistent multidimensional sorted map. The map is indexed by a row key, column key, and a timestamp; each value in the map is an uninterpreted array of bytes.
(row:string, column:string, time:int64) -> string
We settled on this data model after examining a variety of potential uses of a Bigtable-like system. As one concrete example that drove some of our design decisions, suppose we want to keep a copy of a large collection of web pages and related information that could be used by many different projects; let us call this particular table the Webtable. In Webtable, we would use URLs as row keys, various aspects of web pages as column names, and store the contents of the web pages in the contents: column under the timestamps when they were fetched, as illustrated in Figure 1.
Rows
The row keys in a table are arbitrary strings (currently up to 64KB in size, although 10-100 bytes is a typical size for most of our users). Every read or write of data under a single row key is atomic (regardless of the number of different columns being read or written in the row), a design decision that makes it easier for clients to reason about the system's behavior in the presence of concurrent updates to the same row.
Bigtable maintains data in lexicographic order by row key. The row range for a table is dynamically partitioned. Each row range is called a tablet, which is the unit of distribution and load balancing. As a result, reads of short row ranges are efficient and typically require communication with only a small number of machines. Clients can exploit this property by selecting their row keys so that they get good locality for their data accesses. For example, in Webtable, pages in the same domain are grouped together into contiguous rows by reversing the hostname components of the URLs. For example, we store data for maps.google.com/index.html under the key com.google.maps/index.html. Storing pages from the same domain near each other makes some host and domain analyses more efficient.
Columns Families
Column keys are grouped into sets called column families, which form the basic unit of access control. All data stored in a column family is usually of the same type (we compress data in the same column family together). A column family must be created before data can be stored under any column key in that family; after a family has been created, any column key within the family can be used. It is our intent that the number of distinct column families in a table be small (in the hundreds at most), and that families rarely change during operation. In contrast, a table may have an unbounded number of columns.
A column key is named using the following syntax: family:qualifier. Column family names must be printable, but qualifiers may be arbitrary strings. An example column family for the Webtable is language, which stores the language in which a web page was written. We use only one column key in the language family, and it stores each web page's language ID. Another useful column family for this table is anchor; each column key in this family represents a single anchor, as shown in Figure 1. The qualifier is the name of the referring site; the cell contents is the link text.
Timestamps
Each cell in a Bigtable can contain multiple versions of the same data; these versions are indexed by timestamp. Bigtable timestamps are 64-bit integers. They can be assigned by Bigtable, in which case they represent "real time" in microseconds, or be explicitly assigned by client applications. Applications that need to avoid collisions must generate unique timestamps themselves. Different versions of a cell are stored in decreasing timestamp order, so that the most recent versions can be read first.
To make the management of versioned data less onerous, we support two per-column-family settings that tell Bigtable to garbage-collect cell versions automatically. The client can specify either that only the last n versions of a cell be kept, or that only new-enough versions be kept (e.g., only keep values that were written in the last seven days).
In our Webtable example, we set the timestamps of the crawled pages stored in the contents: column to the times at which these page versions were actually crawled. The garbage-collection mechanism described above lets us keep only the most recent three versions of every page.
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