Google Releases Bigtable NoSQL Cloud Database Beta
Google has announced that they have released the Bigtable NoSQL database into its Google Cloud Platform as a beta. Bigtable has been around since 2006. Google released a research publication on Bigtable that details the database storage system capabilities. In the research paper, Google mentioned that many of its flagship products such as search indexing, Google Earth and others all run on Bigtable.
Up until now, Bigtable has not been available to the public. Elements of Bigtable have found their way into Google’s NoSQL cloud datastore, however, the full fledged version had not been released for public consumption. By offering Bigtable, Google looks to lure in cloud customers who may need a more efficient way to store and retrieve Big Data.
Google describes Bigtable as 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.” Google mentions that Google Cloud Bigtable can be accessed using the open-source Apache HBase API. By using this API, Google suggests that Bigtable data can play nice with the Hadoop ecosystem. Google says that Bigtable can integrate into existing Big Data products such as Dataflow and BigQuery.
“Since this is delivered through the standard HBase open-source API and because we’re providing easy services to import and export in standard formats, it makes it very easy for someone to say, ‘You know what? I’ll buy this. I know that if there’s a reason why I don’t like this, it’s easy to get the data out into exactly the same system that was running it before,” says Cory O’Connor, manager of Bigtable at Google.
“Many people have said that’s one of the main reasons why they’re ready to take petabytes of data and dump it into this – because they have that assurance. They feel good about that open-source nature of the interface,” add O’Connor.
Google Bigtable nodes can be purchased at 65 cents per node. Each node delivered 10,000 read/writes per second. Storage for Bigtable is billed at 17 cents per GB on SSD based storage.
