Bigtable is best thought of as an &quot;event database&quot;. High reads, high writes, single index, accessible through the Hbase API. Cassandra and Hbase are similar technologies that are inspired by the original Bigtable paper.<p>One big benefit of Bigtable is its scalability. To scale up, you turn the &#x27;scale&#x27; knob. By contrast, Cassandra and Hbase are headaches to scale (Apple has acquired Cassandra companies to aid in operation and scale).<p>Here&#x27;s a couple of guys from Sungard, who scaled to about 3,000,000 writes per second with a couple weekends&#x27; worth of effort (something only few beyond the likes of Facebook, Netflix, and Apple can achieve) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cloud.google.com&#x2F;bigtable&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;SunGardCATCaseStudy.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cloud.google.com&#x2F;bigtable&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;SunGardCATCaseStudy.pd...</a>