Joy and Pain of Using Google BigTable

After some time battling that database we decided to put it aside and pick up a new battle, Google Bigtable. You can filter your request to ask for the latest cell or a custom range of cells.So any particular value in Bigtable is identified by its row key, column key (including column family) and cell timestamp.Congratulations, you are now a Bigtable expert!We had used the fact we can do fast, ordered scans across a range of row keys. Once or twice a week, for a period of less than a minute, often times less than 10 seconds, a portion of requests (typically less than 1%) to Bigtable would fail or become extremely slow. The top graph shows latency against our Bigtable cluster while the bottom is 500s as reported from our load balancer.

Source: syslog.ravelin.com