Crumbs from Google's Bigtable
For a company that is so big and important, Google is remarkably opaque to the outside world (blogs? - we don't need no stinkin' blogs.) Any info-morsels that drop from the Big Table are always welcome - which makes this downright gobbet of stuff about Bigtable particularly, er, meaty:Bigtable is a distributed storage system for managing structured data that is designed to scale to a very large size: petabytes of data across thousands of commodity servers. Many projects at Google store data in Bigtable, including web indexing, Google Earth, and Google Finance.
Get some while it's hot (and hasn't been taken down by the Google Thought Police.)