The Google SSTable file format is used internally to store Bigtable data. An SSTable provides a persistent, ordered immutable map from keys to values, where both keys and values are arbitrary byte strings. Operations are provided to look up the value associated with a specified key, and to iterate over all key/value pairs in a specified key range. Internally, each SSTable contains a sequence of blocks (typically each block is 64KB in size, but this is configurable). A block index (stored at the end of the SSTable) is used to locate blocks; the index is loaded into memory when the SSTable is opened. A lookup can be performed with a single disk seek: we first find the appropriate block by performing a binary search in the in-memory index, and then reading the appropriate block from disk. Optionally, an SSTable can be completely mapped into memory, which allows us to perform lookups and scans without touching disk.

Updates are committed to a commit log that stores redo records. Of these updates, the recently committed ones are stored in memory in a sorted buffer called a memtable; the older updates are stored in a sequence of SSTables. To recover a tablet, a tablet server reads its metadata from the METADATA table. This metadata contains the list of SSTables that comprise a tablet and a set of a redo points, which are pointers into any commit logs that may contain data for the tablet. The server reads the indices of the SSTables into memory and reconstructs the memtable by applying all of the updates that have committed since the redo points. 

As write operations execute, the size of the memtable increases. When the memtable size reaches a threshold, the memtable is frozen, a new memtable is created, and the frozen memtable is converted to an SSTable and written to GFS. This minor compaction process has two goals: it shrinks the memory usage of the tablet server, and it reduces the amount of data that has to be read from the commit log during recovery if this server dies. Incoming read and write operations can continue while compactions occur.

Every minor compaction creates a new SSTable. If this behavior continued unchecked, read operations might need to merge updates from an arbitrary number of SSTables. Instead, we bound the number of such files by periodically executing a merging compaction in the background. A merging compaction reads the contents of a few SSTables and the memtable, and writes out a new SSTable. The input SSTables and memtable can be discarded as soon as the compaction has finished.

A merging compaction that rewrites all SSTables into exactly one SSTable is called a major compaction. SSTables produced by non-major compactions can contain special deletion entries that suppress deleted data in older SSTables that are still live. A major compaction, on the other hand, produces an SSTable that contains no deletion information or deleted data. Bigtable cycles through all of its tablets and regularly applies major compactions to them. These major compactions allow Bigtable to reclaim resources used by deleted data, and also allow it to ensure that deleted data disappears from the system in a timely fashion, which is important for services that store sensitive data.

Clients can control whether or not the SSTables for a locality group are compressed, and if so, which compression format is used. The user-specified compression format is applied to each SSTable block (whose size is controllable via a locality group specific tuning parameter). Although we lose some space by compressing each block separately, we benefit in that small portions of an SSTable can be read without decompressing the entire file. Many clients use a two-pass custom compression scheme. The first pass uses Bentley and McIlroy’s scheme [6], which compresses long common strings across a large window. The second pass uses a fast compression algorithm that looks for repetitions in a small 16 KB window of the data. Both compression passes are very fast—they encode at 100–200 MB/s, and decode at 400–1000 MB/s on modern machines.

To improve read performance, tablet servers use two levels of caching. The Scan Cache is a higher-level cache that caches the key-value pairs returned by the SSTable interface to the tablet server code. The Block Cache is a lower-level cache that caches SSTables blocks that were read from GFS. The Scan Cache is most useful for applications that tend to read the same data repeatedly. The Block Cache is useful for applications that tend to read data that is close to the data they recently read (e.g., sequential reads, or random reads of different columns in the same locality group within a hot row).

As described in Section 5.3, a read operation has to read from all SSTables that make up the state of a tablet. If these SSTables are not in memory, we may end up doing many disk accesses. We reduce the number of accesses by allowing clients to specify that Bloom fil- ters [7] should be created for SSTables in a particu- lar locality group. A Bloom filter allows us to ask whether an SSTable might contain any data for a spec- ified row/column pair. For certain applications, a small amount of tablet server memory used for storing Bloom filters drastically reduces the number of disk seeks re- quired for read operations. Our use of Bloom filters also implies that most lookups for non-existent rows or columns do not need to touch disk.

Besides the SSTable caches, various other parts of the Bigtable system have been simplified by the fact that all of the SSTables that we generate are immutable. For example, we do not need any synchronization of accesses to the file system when reading from SSTables. As a result, concurrency control over rows can be implemented very efficiently. The only mutable data structure that is accessed by both reads and writes is the memtable. To reduce contention during reads of the memtable, we make each memtable row copy-on-write and allow reads and writes to proceed in parallel.