[cortesi]

This matches my experience with BigTable, down to the short-duration failure spikes.

I feel that something should be said on the plus side of the ledger here. I'm the solo founder of a company that indexes huge amounts of fine-grained information. Bigtable is the key technology that let me start my company on my own: it soaks up all the data we can throw at it, with almost zero maintenance. Even within the stable of GCP technologies it stands out as being particularly reliable.

My biggest "problem" with BigTable is the lack of public information on schema design - which in this context is mostly the art of designing key structures to solve specific problems. I've come up with sensible strategies, but much of it was far from obvious. I can't help but feel that there should be a body of prior art I could draw on.

[rrdharan]

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud Bigtable.

You might find this talk from a recent Google Cloud event useful in this regard:

Visualizing Cloud Bigtable Access Patterns at Twitter for Optimizing Analytics (Cloud Next '18) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QHGhnHx5HQ

[jonomacd]

Yeah, it does sound like I am really down on the product but it does some things very well. If you can work around the very short lived unavailability it is fantastic.