NoSQL For Dummies

Chapter 11

Bigtable Use Cases

In This Chapter

Restructuring data for storage in columns

Storing data for later analysis

Bigtable is used to manage very large amounts of data across many servers, up to petabytes of data and hundreds, if not thousands, of servers.

If you’re using relational databases but having issues with them, you might think that Bigtable clones are the natural place to start looking for help. After all, they’re tables, so they must be similar to relational databases, right? Unfortunately, that’s not the case.

Bigtable clones handle some issues well that relational database don’t solve — for example, with sparse data problems, where datasets contain many different types of values, but only a handful of those values are used. Bigtable clones are also able to analyze data while it’s in-flight, rather than in overnight batches in a separate data warehouse.

This chapter shows how managing data in relational database differs from managing the same data in a Bigtable. I also talk about how to store data effectively for later analysis, and for providing historic summaries of data analyzed.

Handling Sparse Data

At times, a relational database management system (RDBMS) may have a table design (a schema) in which the columns don’t have a value. An example is a social media ...