System APIs

BigTable provides APIs for two types of operations:

• Metadata operations
• Data operations

Metadata operations#

BigTable provides APIs for creating and deleting tables and column families. It also provides functions for changing cluster, table, and column family metadata, such as access control rights.

Data operations#

Clients can insert, modify, or delete values in BigTable. Clients can also lookup values from individual rows or iterate over a subset of the data in a table.

• BigTable supports single-row transactions, which can be used to perform atomic read-modify-write sequences on data stored under a single row key.
• Bigtable does not support transactions across row keys, but provides a client interface for batch writing across row keys.
• BigTable allows cells to be used as integer counters.
• A set of wrappers allow a BigTable to be used both as an input source and as an output target for MapReduce jobs.
• Clients can also write scripts in Sawzall (a language developed at Google) to instruct server-side data processing (transform, filter, aggregate) prior to the network fetch.

Here are APIs for write operations:

• Set(): write cells in a row
• DeleteCells(): delete cells in a row
• DeleteRow(): delete all cells in a row

A read or scan operation can read arbitrary cells in a BigTable:

• Each row read operation is atomic.
• Can ask for data from just one row, all rows, etc.
• Can restrict returned rows to a particular range.
• Can ask for all columns, just certain columns families, or specific columns.