Purchase includes free access to book updates online and a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Chapters: Google Earth, Youtube, Google Maps, Google Books, Orkut, Mapreduce, Blogger, Google Code, Cassandra, Google Reader, Bigtable, Hbase, Hypertable. Excerpt: BigTable is a compressed , high performance, and proprietary database system built on Google File System (GFS), Chubby Lock Service , and a few other Google programs; it is currently not distributed or used outside of Google, although Google offers access to it as part of their Google App Engine . History BigTable development began in 2004 and is now used by a number of Google applications, such as MapReduce , which is often used for generating and modifying data stored in BigTable , Google Reader , Google Maps , Google Book Search , "My Search History", Google Earth , Blogger.com , Google Code hosting, Orkut , YouTube , and Gmail . Google's reasons for developing its own database include scalability, and better control of performance characteristics. Design BigTable is a fast and extremely large-scale DBMS . However, it departs from the typical convention of a fixed number of columns, instead described by the authors as "a sparse, distributed multi-dimensional sorted map", sharing characteristics of both row-oriented and column-oriented databases. BigTable is designed to scale into the petabyte range across "hundreds or thousands of machines, and to make it easy to add more machines the system and automatically start taking advantage of those resources without any reconfiguration". Each table has multiple dimensions (one of which is a field for time, allowing for versioning and garbage collection ). Tables are optimized for GFS by being split into multiple tablets - segments of the table as split along a row chosen such that the tablet will be ~200 megabytes in size. When sizes threaten to grow beyond a specified limit, the t...
