Google Cloud Bigtable is a web service that allows global storage and retrieval of large volumes of data at any time.
Google Cloud Bigtable is a sparsely populated table that can scale to billions of rows and thousands of columns and enables you to store terabytes or even petabytes of data. A Bigtable is a sparse, distributed, persistent multidimensional sorted map.
Cloud Bigtable stores data in massively scalable tables, each of which is a sorted key-value map. The table is composed of rows and columns. Each row typically describes a single entity and the columns contain individual values for each row. Each row is indexed by a single row key and columns that are related to one another are typically grouped together into a column family. Each column is identified by a combination of the column family and a column qualifier, which is a unique name within the column family.
Each row-column intersection can contain multiple cells, or versions, at different timestamp, providing a record of how the stored data has been altered over time. If a cell in Google Cloud Bigtable table does not contain any data, it does not take up any space.