Bigtable: A Distributed Storage System for Structured Data

Bigtable is a distributed structured storage used inside the Google data centers.
The Bigtable interface is very simple, consisting of mapping a key tuple with three fileds to a string object (array of bytes).
For implementation, a row is the unit of distribution and load balancing.


I really liked this paper, it presents a simple abstraction that is useful in many circumstances and easy to scale. I think it will probably be influential in 10 years because traditional databases are harder and harder to scale at modern data center sizes.