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Bigtable is described as a fast and extremely scalable DBMS (database management system). It is based on the proprietary Google File System, which gives Bigtable the ability to scale across hundreds or thousands of commodity servers that collectively can store petabytes of data.

Each table is a multidimensional sparse map. The table consists of rows and columns, and each cell has a time stamp. There can be multiple versions of a cell with different time stamps. The time stamp allows for operations such as "select 'n' versions of this Web page" or "delete cells that are older than … "

In order to manage the huge tables, Bigtable splits tables at row boundaries and saves them as tablets. Each tablet is around 200MB, and each server saves about 100 tablets. This setup allows tablets from a single table to be spread among many machines. It also allows for fine-grained load balancing, because if one table is receiving many queries, it can shed other tablets or move the busy table to another machine that is not so busy. Also, if a machine goes down, a tablet may be spread across many other machines so that the performance impact on any given machine is minimal.

Tables are stored as immutable SSTables and a tail of logs (one log per machine). When a machine's system memory is full, it compresses some tablets using Google proprietary compression techniques such as BMDiff and Zippy. Minor compactions involve only a few tablets, while major compactions involve the whole table system and recover hard-disk space.

The locations of Bigtable tablets are stored in cells. The lookup of any particular tablet is handled by a three-tiered system. The clients get a point to a META0 table, of which there is only one. The META0 table keeps track of many META1 tablets that contain the locations of the tablets being looked up. Both META0 and META1 make heavy use of pre-fetching and caching to minimize bottlenecks in the system.