Last night during our discussion, Abuzar brought up Google's Bigtable database, and the open source Hypertable implementation. I just wanted to follow up on that discussion, as I think anyone who is working with large data-sets may benefit from it.<br>
<br>With regards to the tablet implementation - on the surface, its usage
looks similar to having multiple tables within a regular RDBMS, but
instead of each table within the RDBMS being somewhat "disjointed" from
each other (requiring you to "join" rows from multiple tables to get a
unique data-set), Hypertable (BigTable) just has each of these tables
as sub-tables - part of a bigger main table.<br>
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Here's the link to the Google research publication regarding BigTable: <a href="http://labs.google.com/papers/bigtable.html">http://labs.google.com/papers/bigtable.html</a><br>And Wikipedia's article on BigTable: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BigTable">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BigTable</a><br>
<br>From what I can see, the benefits include the ability to store
extremely large sets of data into a single table, across a distributed
file-system (such as GFS), along with having version control "built-in" via another table dimension. All this seems that it is accomplished without the need for a database server of any kind (though I'm not sure about this). Any performance increase, it seems, comes from requiring the client application to cache references to sub-tables within a bigger table.<br>
<br>If anyone has a better understanding of how this works, please share!<br clear="all"><br>-- <br>J. Bobby Lopez<br>Web: <a href="http://jbldata.com/">http://jbldata.com/</a><br>Twitter: <a href="http://www.twitter.com/jbobbylopez">http://www.twitter.com/jbobbylopez</a><br>
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