Bigtable database design theory

Question

I am very well versed in the theory and practice of relational database design.

I know what works and what doesn\'t, what is performant and what is maintainable (almost

Answer 1

There's not much recent literature on non-relational database design that I'm aware of - though you might gain some valuable insights by digging up old papers from before the relational paradigm 'won'.

The basic insight of databases like Bigtable is, of course, that in web-apps and other read-heavy applications, given the availability of cheap disk storage, the best approach is to optimize for reads, and do more work on writes. Normalization does the opposite - minimizing replication of data on disk, thus making writes easier and cheaper, but reads harder. Pretty much all the differences to relational database design arise from this single fact.

The other consequence - one that could use more attention - is that when you optimize for reads, you have to know what type of reads you will be engaging in ahead of time, while normalized structures are more or less read-agnostic.