Ask HN: Who is using bigtable and what's your experience with it? - xstartup
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ronnietehnub
My company is currently using big table in production, it is really great
since it scales linearly by nodes. That is as long as you get the row key
design / store paradigms correct.

Super fast for lookups (can be as quick as using something like Redis which
store in memory). Row ranges by prefix are how you can efficiently scan your
data. Tables scans while not necessarily frowned upon, you should most likely
try to avoid , especially for high write throughput systems since it will eat
your IOPS up.

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enitihas
How do you think it compares to Google cloud data store?

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funkjunky
Former GCP support here. Bigtable and Cloud Datastore (or the newer, shinier
Firestore) are very different, and meant for different purposes.

Bigtable is meant for wide-column data at high volume. If your data can be
organized into simple rows and columns, and you plan on using massive amounts
of it at high throughout (think IoT transactions, for example), then bigtable
is the right choice.

Datastore, on the other hand, is for semi-structured data, with parent/child
hierarchies, key value pairs, etc. It isn't run on a cluster of nodes like
bigtable, but is managed behind the scenes as part of App Engine. It is slower
than bigtable, but is more sophisticated, and offers client libraries for ORMs
(ndb), SQL-like queries, and the like.

There's a brief comparison chart here: [https://cloud.google.com/storage-
options/](https://cloud.google.com/storage-options/)

I also highly recommend the Google cloud data engineering course at Coursera:
[https://www.coursera.org/specializations/gcp-data-machine-
le...](https://www.coursera.org/specializations/gcp-data-machine-learning)

Or the instructor's book, " Data Science on the Google Cloud Platform:
Implementing End-to-End Real-Time Data Pipelines: From Ingest to Machine
Learning"

[https://www.amazon.com/dp/1491974567/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_DILV...](https://www.amazon.com/dp/1491974567/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_DILVAbTAV80A7)

