Papershelf
Bigtable: A Distributed Storage System for Structured Data
A storage paper about tablets, locality, compaction, and the shape of a distributed database built on top of a file system.
databasesdistributed systemsstorage
Why I read it
Bigtable sits in the space between filesystems and databases. It is a good paper for understanding how storage layout, serving paths, and compaction policy shape database behavior.
What it teaches
- Data model choices show up later as operational behavior.
- Tablet splitting and locality matter for scale and predictable access.
- Compaction is not cleanup. It is part of the read and write path.
What I am watching
I am reading it for the backend intuition: how storage engines make tradeoffs before the application ever sends a query.