Google and Sparse Tables
September 24, 2008
Google received a patent for an invention crafted by some of the firm’s most wizardly wizards; for example, Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, and Andrew Fikes, among others. US7,428,524 is a plumbing invention with the helpful title “Large Scale Data Storage in Sparse Tables”. The abstract said:
Each of a plurality of data items is stored in a table data structure. A row identifier and column identifier are associated with each respective data item, and each respective item is stored at a logical location in the table data structure specified by its row identifier and column identifier. A plurality of data items is stored in a cell of the table data structure, and a timestamp is associated with each of the plurality of data items stored in the cell. Each of the data items stored in the cell has the same row identifier, the same column identifier, and a distinct timestamp. In some embodiments, each row identifier is a string of arbitrary length and arbitrary value. Similarly, in some embodiments each column identifier is a string of arbitrary length and arbitrary value.
Don’t let the fuzzy legalese put you to sleep. This is a key infrastructure invention which adds one more paving stone to Google’s building a Roman road right to the heart of enterprise data management and high performance for consumer facing services. You can obtain a copy from the USPTO’s Web site here.
Stephen Arnold, September 24, 2008
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