Google’s datastore, known as Bigtable, is a column-oriented NoSQL datastore that is accessible via Google App Engine. Rather than the schemas you’d find in a relational database, Bigtable is basically a massively distributed persistence map — one that permits queries on keys and attributes of the underlying data values. Working with the datastore is vastly different than what you’ve probably grown accustomed to with traditional relational systems. For example, there are no joins in the traditional sense; nevertheless, even though the datastore lacks some expected features, it offers quite a few features you probably aren’t used to.
In this podcast, hosted by IBM DeveloperWorks, Max Ross, a Google engineer who leads the development of the App Engine datastore (Max also founded Hibernate Shards) shares many interesting details on the GAE platform, how it differs from EC2, how the datastore works, and where it is going in the future.
If you find Google App Engine interesting, check out these articles:
- Twitter mining with Objectify-Appengine, Part 1
- Schemaless data modeling with Bigtable and Groovy’s Gaelyk
- Gaelyk for Google App Engine
- Hello Google App Engine
