Google Cloud Bigtable vs Google Cloud Datastore

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Andrei F picture Andrei F · May 6, 2015 · Viewed 42.7k times · Source

What is the difference between Google Cloud Bigtable and Google Cloud Datastore / App Engine datastore, and what are the main practical advantages/disadvantages? AFAIK Cloud Datastore is build on top of Bigtable.

Answer

Les Vogel - Google DevRel picture Les Vogel - Google DevRel · May 7, 2015

Bigtable is optimized for high volumes of data and analytics

  • Cloud Bigtable doesn’t replicate data across zones or regions (data within a single cluster is replicated and durable), which means Bigtable is faster and more efficient, and costs are much lower, though it is less durable and available in the default configuration
  • It uses the HBase API - there’s no risk of lock-in or new paradigms to learn
  • It is integrated with the open-source Big Data tools, meaning you can analyze the data stored in Bigtable in most analytics tools customers use (Hadoop, Spark, etc.)
  • Bigtable is indexed by a single Row Key
  • Bigtable is in a single zone

Cloud Bigtable is designed for larger companies and enterprises who often have larger data needs with complex backend workloads.

Datastore is optimized to serve high-value transactional data to applications

  • Cloud Datastore has extremely high availability with replication and data synchronization
  • Datastore, because of its versatility and high availability, is more expensive
  • Datastore is slower writing data due to synchronous replication
  • Datastore has much better functionality around transactions and queries (since secondary indexes exist)

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