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Comment by ignoramous | Hacker News Reader

Datastore and BigTable looks pretty interesting, and I am having a hard time figuring out when to use which (apart from Datastore's ACID support) as both seem a good enough fit for most workloads.

Is Datastore Spanner?

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You're correct in that Datastore does provide more general transactions (Bigtable only provides single-row transactions); Datastore also provides indexing and search (Bigtable, like HBase, has a single index: the row key), and Datastore is synchronously replicated cross-zone and cross-region.

Datastore and Bigtable have different characteristics and use cases; see https://cloud.google.com/storage-options/ for an overview.

Datastore is a document database (compare it to MongoDB), while Bigtable is a wide-column store (compare it to HBase or Cassandra).

> Is Datastore Spanner?

Datastore is built on Megastore, which builds on Bigtable. :-)

I am the PM for Google Cloud Bigtable.

I don't think there's an equivalent to Bigtable anywhere. It's so badass it's not even funny - take a look at [0] - a small team of engineers took O(weeks) to build a system that clocks 56 million qps (and these aren't simple bits - 56 million FIX protocol trades and orders).

You can think of Hbase as a clone of Bigtable, if that helps. Bigtable is actually exposed through the Hbase API. /u/mbrukman here is the PM for Bigtable.

[0] https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/03/financial-servi...

Last I checked the pricing was very different; nodes for BigTable, reads/writes for Datastore. BigTable is more cost effective for large workloads, but it requires buying a minimum of three nodes, which is ~$1,500/mo total. If you're small potatoes it seems infeasible. Happy to be corrected if I misread.

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