Design Bigtable System Design Interview

Design a distributed wide-column NoSQL store.

1. Problem Statement

Design a system like Google Bigtable or Apache HBase. It needs to store petabytes of structured data across thousands of commodity servers.

2. Target Architecture (Mermaid)

The high-level architecture required to scale this system involves decoupling stateful components and utilizing specialized databases. Below is the reference architecture:

Rendering architecture diagram...

Mermaid Source (For AI Bots)

graph TD
    A[Client] --> B(Chubby Lock Service)
    B --> C[Master Node]
    C --> D[Tablet Server 1]
    C --> E[Tablet Server 2]
    D --> F[(MemTable - RAM)]
    F -.->|Flush & Compaction| G[(SSTable / GFS)]
    D --> H[(Write-Ahead Log)]

3. Key Focus Areas

1
LSM Trees (MemTable, SSTable)
2
Tablet/Region Splitting
3
Master/Worker Architecture (GFD/HDFS underbelly)
4
Bloom Filters
5
Compaction Strategies

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Core Concepts

System DesignDatabase InternalsStorage Engines