Is the column-family based data model of Cassandra the same as the column-family based data modle of Google's BigTable?

Question

Well if I understand correctly, Google's proprietary BigTable is built on Google's proprietary GFS.

So at the homepage of http://cassandra.apache.org/ they are actually claiming to have BigTable's column-family based data model?

I mean i really do not see how it is possible.

Is the column-family based data model of Cassandra the same as the column-family based data model of Google's BigTable?

Answer 1

Google has published research papers about some of its core technologies, for instance Big Table and MapReduce. Cassandra is saying they use the concept from the Big Table paper and not Google's implementation.

Answer 2

Cassandra's data model is related to Bigtable's but not identical. "Inspired by" would be more accurate.

For instance, Cassandra supports indexing column values which Bigtable does not.

See http://www.datastax.com/docs/0.8/data_model/index for more on Cassandra's data model.