It's been known for a long time that Google don't use a standard commercial DBMS to power their search engines. With a need to provide high-performance, highly scalable data access in a very specific domain it is understandable that they chose to build a custom database engine that exactly matched their needs. They call it BigTable.

It's a little more surprising however that BigTable is also a good enough solution for some of Google's other products: Google Earth, blogger.com, Orkut (their answer to Facebook) and even parts of YouTube. So somehow BigTable has evolved into a useful and functional solution for a range of applications.

Then, just a couple of months ago (April 2008), they announced Google App Engine. This is a web-application development platform that uses BigTable as it's back-end datastore. Anyone with an App Engine developer account can now actually use BigTable themselves and build applications that use it.

It's not often that a major new database solution appears in what is already a saturated and mature market. But with Google's massive mindshare what are their chances of success and how will BigTable alter the database landscape?

In this session I'll be taking a close look at what makes BigTable tick, I'll compare and contrast it with some database technology that we are all familiar with and I'll be looking at the impact BigTable may have on the database market.