Google has announced the release of a new managed NoSQL database to be powered by its Bigtable data storage system. Cloud Bigtable promises to deliver single-digit millisecond latency and twice the performance for every dollar, compared with other database management systems such as Cassandra and HBase.
Cloud Bigtable caters to big companies built around the petabyte-scale data ecosystem. In recent years, Google has offered its Cloud Datastore, the company's fully managed solution that is meant to store non-relational data. The present service, which depends on Bigtable, is what Tom Kershaw, Google Cloud Platform's director of product management for big data, storage and networking, described as their "getting-started NoSQL database."
Kershaw added that Google Cloud Bigtable "is based on technology that Google has been running internally for many years, so it is not a brand new thing."
Google claims that its Cloud Bigtable works faster than other NoSQL data stores. An internal benchmark result shows that Bigtable – compared with the Cassandra NoSQL database and the generic version of HBase – features a lower latency for writing and reading data.
"Cloud Bigtable scales to hundreds of petabytes and millions of reads and writes per second while maintaining single-digit millisecond latencies," reads the Google page for the Cloud Platform. "No workload is too large to handle."
Cloud Bigtable is Google's latest move to gain a leading position in the growing public cloud industry. Currently dominated by Amazon Web Services, the market is also being staked out by other rival services like Microsoft Azure.
Nick Heudecker, a research director at tech analyst firm Garner, thinks that Google's new venture can be a compelling move for the company. According to Heudecker, businesses have no need to deal with the intricacies involved in creating and operating HBase.
"It's not clear that Google has a robust enterprise marketing and sales organization in place to truly go sell this into the enterprise," said Heudecker.
Several third-party vendors have already adopted Cloud Bigtable as part of their services. One of them is Sungard, a financial software and services company, which has created a financial audit-trail system on Bigtable. The system can handle 2.5 million trade messages every second.
Currently in beta, Google Cloud Bigtable offers free trial to users who want to sign up for the service. Pricing tiers will be based on various factors, including the amount of used storage, the number of nodes deployed and network usage.
