In the previous chapter, we took a closer look at the RDBMS services of GCP, Cloud SQL, and Cloud Spanner. These are great for many use cases, but there are also several situations in which they are not quite the right tool. The NoSQL offerings on the GCP, Bigtable, and Datastore might come in handy here. Bigtable is similar in many ways to Apache's HBase, while Datastore is a document database that competes with alternatives such as MongoDB.

Now, one little bit of fine print: in this chapter, we will use the terms NoSQL and RDBMS as if they are perfect alternatives; that is, it might seem like any storage solution that is not an RDBMS is a NoSQL database. That's not quite strictly true. BigQuery, for instance, is a SQL-compliant data warehouse, which is certainly not an RDBMS. So, the term NoSQL really only means that the data is not accessed via SQL...