e.g. my reports' missions would be something like "BigTable Turn-ups Fast", my mission might be "Reliable BigTable Service", my boss's might be "Reliable Storage Systems", his boss's might be "Healthy NYC-SRE Teams", his boss's might be "East Coast SRE", his boss's might be "SRE Tech Infra" & so on.
February 25, 2025 at 7:54 AM
e.g. my reports' missions would be something like "BigTable Turn-ups Fast", my mission might be "Reliable BigTable Service", my boss's might be "Reliable Storage Systems", his boss's might be "Healthy NYC-SRE Teams", his boss's might be "East Coast SRE", his boss's might be "SRE Tech Infra" & so on.
Someone asked for some resources to learn more about distributed systems today and my knee-jerk was to go to Jeff Dean's Google Research page and read the distributed systems papers there starting w/ the oldest and skipping the ML stuff.
MapReduce, BigTable, Spanner, Tail at Scale, all excellent.
MapReduce, BigTable, Spanner, Tail at Scale, all excellent.
Jeffrey Dean
research.google
November 1, 2024 at 4:29 AM
Someone asked for some resources to learn more about distributed systems today and my knee-jerk was to go to Jeff Dean's Google Research page and read the distributed systems papers there starting w/ the oldest and skipping the ML stuff.
MapReduce, BigTable, Spanner, Tail at Scale, all excellent.
MapReduce, BigTable, Spanner, Tail at Scale, all excellent.
i am reminded of how every company needed to use bigtable or bigtable equivalent tooling, if only to feel important about whatever app they were writing
November 14, 2024 at 6:28 PM
i am reminded of how every company needed to use bigtable or bigtable equivalent tooling, if only to feel important about whatever app they were writing
I just blocked somebody because they replied to that vid with the dad losing his mind at BIGTABLE and said "is that the only table big enough to fit Trump's ego" and I replied with this post and she said "that's not 'bringing up politics' it's the only thing I could think for a size comparison" 😒
hey here's an idea: if you see a post where someone is talking about something that isn't about politics, maybe don't bring politics up. we're all pretty tired.
May 15, 2026 at 4:52 AM
I just blocked somebody because they replied to that vid with the dad losing his mind at BIGTABLE and said "is that the only table big enough to fit Trump's ego" and I replied with this post and she said "that's not 'bringing up politics' it's the only thing I could think for a size comparison" 😒
(if you're a connoisseur of old google database papers you can enjoy reliving the progression of gfs -> bigtable -> percolator -> spanner as they figured out how to update the index incrementally)
June 24, 2026 at 10:56 PM
(if you're a connoisseur of old google database papers you can enjoy reliving the progression of gfs -> bigtable -> percolator -> spanner as they figured out how to update the index incrementally)
Yes, Borg, BigTable, Spanner, etc., although a lot of that has been exposed to the public via GCP these days as well.
October 29, 2024 at 10:10 AM
Yes, Borg, BigTable, Spanner, etc., although a lot of that has been exposed to the public via GCP these days as well.
Bigtable update on September 22, 2026 https://docs.cloud.google.com/bigtable/docs/release-notes#September_22_2026 #googlecloud You can use the Google Cloud console to create and manage protobuf schemas (schema bundles) for your Bigtable tables
September 22, 2026 at 2:40 PM
Bigtable update on September 22, 2026 https://docs.cloud.google.com/bigtable/docs/release-notes#September_22_2026 #googlecloud You can use the Google Cloud console to create and manage protobuf schemas (schema bundles) for your Bigtable tables
I’ve thought about these Steve Yegge anecdotes like once a week since I first read them
June 24, 2025 at 2:25 AM
I’ve thought about these Steve Yegge anecdotes like once a week since I first read them
Google Books SRE encompassed everything from physical hardware to running Bigtable to deploying the scan station software to maintaining the batch metadata cultivation jobs to ensuring OCR ran smoothly and fed to recaptcha to, in the later years, operating a digital storefront with ebooks.
July 30, 2026 at 12:49 AM
Google Books SRE encompassed everything from physical hardware to running Bigtable to deploying the scan station software to maintaining the batch metadata cultivation jobs to ensuring OCR ran smoothly and fed to recaptcha to, in the later years, operating a digital storefront with ebooks.
Thanks to Google BigTable for providing prizes to the top 3 @db.cs.cmu.edu students with the fastest projects in our Database Systems course this semester! They have to implement a buffer pool, B+Tree, query executors, and MVCC. Students are encouraged to profile+benchmark to get better rankings.
March 27, 2026 at 8:39 PM
Thanks to Google BigTable for providing prizes to the top 3 @db.cs.cmu.edu students with the fastest projects in our Database Systems course this semester! They have to implement a buffer pool, B+Tree, query executors, and MVCC. Students are encouraged to profile+benchmark to get better rankings.
Bigtable update on April 30, 2026 https://docs.cloud.google.com/bigtable/docs/release-notes#April_30_2026 #googlecloud You can use Bigtable agent skills to let AI agents assist with Bigtable-related tasks, such as schema design, generating SQL queries, and infrastructure management.
April 30, 2026 at 5:20 PM
Bigtable update on April 30, 2026 https://docs.cloud.google.com/bigtable/docs/release-notes#April_30_2026 #googlecloud You can use Bigtable agent skills to let AI agents assist with Bigtable-related tasks, such as schema design, generating SQL queries, and infrastructure management.
tfw you're grabbing the unencrypted replication pushes between googles dcs right after you ripped off bigtable to create accumulo
June 19, 2025 at 12:16 AM
tfw you're grabbing the unencrypted replication pushes between googles dcs right after you ripped off bigtable to create accumulo
ah at first i thought it was a BigTable / Spanner situation, but that sounds a lot worse. :D
May 6, 2026 at 5:39 AM
ah at first i thought it was a BigTable / Spanner situation, but that sounds a lot worse. :D
About a year ago, Binocular was born. At the time, my workplace was using Google's Bigtable database as primary database, and we were using the integrated Bigtable studio to analyze our data, which made debugging incredibly tedious. Today, I've released v1.0.0, and I couldn't be prouder.
August 25, 2026 at 8:30 PM
About a year ago, Binocular was born. At the time, my workplace was using Google's Bigtable database as primary database, and we were using the integrated Bigtable studio to analyze our data, which made debugging incredibly tedious. Today, I've released v1.0.0, and I couldn't be prouder.
Engineering tongue twister:
"I have to update my BigQuery Tables and my BigTable Queries"
"I have to update my BigQuery Tables and my BigTable Queries"
October 22, 2024 at 8:00 PM
Engineering tongue twister:
"I have to update my BigQuery Tables and my BigTable Queries"
"I have to update my BigQuery Tables and my BigTable Queries"
I don't remember the specific names anymore but I do seem to believe BigTable was involved in there somewhere.
I think our team had built something on top of BigTable, then migrated to something that didn't last, but had to be emulated with some other tech under it to keep our shit working?
I think our team had built something on top of BigTable, then migrated to something that didn't last, but had to be emulated with some other tech under it to keep our shit working?
May 6, 2026 at 6:29 AM
I don't remember the specific names anymore but I do seem to believe BigTable was involved in there somewhere.
I think our team had built something on top of BigTable, then migrated to something that didn't last, but had to be emulated with some other tech under it to keep our shit working?
I think our team had built something on top of BigTable, then migrated to something that didn't last, but had to be emulated with some other tech under it to keep our shit working?
May 22, 2025 at 10:56 AM
Perhaps the AWS version of Google's "It's Bigtable all the way down."
April 8, 2026 at 7:03 PM
Perhaps the AWS version of Google's "It's Bigtable all the way down."
🚀 This Week at Apache Hop 🚀
- Fixed database schema generation & Regex evaluation.
- Docs: Regex Evaluation, Beam Bigtable Input, Kettle Import.
- Fixed transform selection, file movement (Windows), & dialog resizing.
📢 Join the conversation!
lnkd.in/eUETpiZv
#apachehop #dataengineering #opensource
- Fixed database schema generation & Regex evaluation.
- Docs: Regex Evaluation, Beam Bigtable Input, Kettle Import.
- Fixed transform selection, file movement (Windows), & dialog resizing.
📢 Join the conversation!
lnkd.in/eUETpiZv
#apachehop #dataengineering #opensource
November 22, 2024 at 9:10 AM
🚀 This Week at Apache Hop 🚀
- Fixed database schema generation & Regex evaluation.
- Docs: Regex Evaluation, Beam Bigtable Input, Kettle Import.
- Fixed transform selection, file movement (Windows), & dialog resizing.
📢 Join the conversation!
lnkd.in/eUETpiZv
#apachehop #dataengineering #opensource
- Fixed database schema generation & Regex evaluation.
- Docs: Regex Evaluation, Beam Bigtable Input, Kettle Import.
- Fixed transform selection, file movement (Windows), & dialog resizing.
📢 Join the conversation!
lnkd.in/eUETpiZv
#apachehop #dataengineering #opensource
Yeah it was a tap between google and others datacenters shortly after they replicated googles key value store based on google’s BigTable paper. Probably the worst thing to come out of the snowden revelations but didn’t get as much attention as prism which was incorrectly reported on
April 18, 2024 at 12:03 AM
Yeah it was a tap between google and others datacenters shortly after they replicated googles key value store based on google’s BigTable paper. Probably the worst thing to come out of the snowden revelations but didn’t get as much attention as prism which was incorrectly reported on
You can also view schema bundle definitions in Bigtable Studio. This feature is generally available (GA). For more information, see Create and manage protobuf schemas.
September 22, 2026 at 2:40 PM
You can also view schema bundle definitions in Bigtable Studio. This feature is generally available (GA). For more information, see Create and manage protobuf schemas.
I was one of the first users of Colossus ... a 20PB Bigtable that was hitting all kinds of GFS limittions that we had circumvented with kludges that were becoming more and more unmaintainable ... Colossus just FixedEverything.
February 19, 2026 at 5:38 PM
I was one of the first users of Colossus ... a 20PB Bigtable that was hitting all kinds of GFS limittions that we had circumvented with kludges that were becoming more and more unmaintainable ... Colossus just FixedEverything.
The new Model Context Protocol spec (2026-07-28) is live! 🎉
We're honored to have co-led the Transport WG to introduce a stateless core to MCP. Learning from scaling Google Cloud’s database MCP tools, this update brings greater reliability to everyone.
📖: bit.ly/4c8fbC1
🎙️: bit.ly/4pIejJY
We're honored to have co-led the Transport WG to introduce a stateless core to MCP. Learning from scaling Google Cloud’s database MCP tools, this update brings greater reliability to everyone.
📖: bit.ly/4c8fbC1
🎙️: bit.ly/4pIejJY
Stateless: The Future of MCP Transports - Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF)
The operational scale of MCP is significant: Google Cloud maintains the reliability for its MCP servers supporting AlloyDB, Spanner, Cloud SQL, Bigtable, and F…
bit.ly
July 28, 2026 at 10:02 PM
The new Model Context Protocol spec (2026-07-28) is live! 🎉
We're honored to have co-led the Transport WG to introduce a stateless core to MCP. Learning from scaling Google Cloud’s database MCP tools, this update brings greater reliability to everyone.
📖: bit.ly/4c8fbC1
🎙️: bit.ly/4pIejJY
We're honored to have co-led the Transport WG to introduce a stateless core to MCP. Learning from scaling Google Cloud’s database MCP tools, this update brings greater reliability to everyone.
📖: bit.ly/4c8fbC1
🎙️: bit.ly/4pIejJY