Comments on: BigTable and Why it Changes Everything

By: Pedram

Pedram — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 09:39:12 +0000

I think you over emphasized the title…

Rich: I don’t think I did. Google have redefined application deployment with app engine. Not only through their simple one line deploy tool (easy to do with fabric, capistrano, ant, maven, etc) but also through the zero configuration database.

Just define your models and off you go. Have you seen that before?

By: The Punch Barrel / BigTable and Why it Changes Everything

The Punch Barrel / BigTable and Why it Changes Everything — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 12:26:47 +0000

[...] BigTable and Why it Changes Everything [...]

By: Dhananjay Nene

Dhananjay Nene — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 19:33:25 +0000

Sure bigtable is a different way to look at RDBMS’s but I wouldn’t yet go as far as to say it changes everything. It is one more option. But a substantial portion of the current enterprise application portfolio is unlikely to be heading the bigtable way since many of them may not be able to comfortable with the limited transactional capabilities of Big Table.

By: Rich Atkinson

Rich Atkinson — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 23:09:57 +0000

Hi Ken.
It would be unfair of me to compare it against any of the above as I don’t have experience with them.

I’d love to hear from anyone who does?

Cheers
- Rich

By: ken

ken — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 17:12:14 +0000

Well now I’m really suspicious! I’d never heard of Cache, and I’ve only heard bad things about ZODB. While that’s not necessarily bad, it’s not a good sign when a new product only looks good compared to the worst of the old bunch. I wonder how it compares to OODBs people actually like, like db4o, AllegroGraph, or even Versant.

By: Rich Atkinson

Rich Atkinson — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 22:21:39 +0000

@Dan
Thanks! I didn’t realise Hbase was ready for mass use yet. I’ll definitely look into it. Cheers.

@Ben
Hadoop is related, but slightly different. It’s a Java implementation of mapreduce.

@Ken
You are correct, conceptually this is closer to other types of OODB, such as Cache or Zope.

However I’ve never been quite so captivated by any previous OODB implementation.

I expect that it’s the zero configuration aspect that caught my imagination. I’d like to see a lot more of this in the future.

@fauigerzigerk
Limited querying capability is probably the most common complaint of the Datastore API. I’m no expert in analytics or warehousing, but I suspect that this model is just as powerful as an RDBMS, only requires a different approach to fully exploit it’s potential.

If you look at what Google do with maps, earth, search… I expect it’s implementing your algorithms using the map/reduce principles that makes all the difference. It would be interesting to have a look at some specific examples of perceived limitations, and how they could be approached using map/reduce.

Thanks all for your comments.

- Rich

By: fauigerzigerk

fauigerzigerk — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 20:21:30 +0000

I looked at BigTable. I’m sure it’s fine for most web apps, but the query facilities are very very very limited. BigTable surely isn’t supposed to support data warehousing / analytics scenarios.

By: ken

ken — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 18:40:25 +0000

You only compare BigTable to RDBMSs, but from your description, it looks much more like a match for an OODB. How does it compare to other OODBs?

By: Ben

Ben — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 17:53:17 +0000

Hadoop has an open-source table that works like BigTable, if I understand correctly…

By: Dan

Dan — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 16:09:20 +0000

Check out HBase for an open source bigtable. It’s part of the Apache Lucene project. They also have Hadoop, a map/reduce impl, and Nutch, a search engine written on top of it.

It’s written in Java, but is callable from Python very easily. I use it from TurboGears, but it should be equally usable from Django.