Bigtable: A Distributed Storage System for Structured Data.
Bigtable is a distributed storage system for managing structured data that is designed to scale to a very large size: petabytes of data across thousands of commodity servers. Many projects at Google store data in Bigtable, including web indexing, Google Earth, and Google Finance.

Features:

1.Bigtable maintains data in lexicographic order by row key.

2.The Bigtable API provides functions for creating and deleting tables and column families. It also provides functions for changing cluster, table, and column family metadata, such as access control rights.

3.A BigTable cluster typically operates in a shared pool of machines that run a wide variety of other distributed applications, and Bigtable processes often share the same machines with processes from other applications.

4.The Bigtable has three major components: a library that is linked into every client, one master server, and many tablet servers.

5.Tablet servers can be dynamically added (or removed)from a cluster to accommodate changes in workloads.

6.The master is responsible for detecting the addition and expiration of tablet servers, balancing server load. In addition, it handles schema changes such as table and column creations.

7.The tablet server handles read and write requests that it has loaded.