Can someone provide a real-world example of how data would be structured within a Bigtable? Please talk from a search engine, social networking or any other familiar point of view which illustrates clearly and pragmatically how the row -> column family -> column combo is superior to traditional normalized relational approaches.
Answer
Reading the original Google white paper was helpful:
As was this comprehensive list of information sources on Google data architecture:
http://highscalability.com/google-architecture
Update: 11/4/14
A new version of the Google white paper PDF can be found here:
http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en/us/archive/bigtable-osdi06.pdf