Google has played a major role in advancing the world of large-scale data persistence. Necessity is the mother of invention. With the creation of Bigtable, Google had an ideal solution to some of its hardest internal problems, such as indexing the internet, charting the entire planet, and building the world's largest catalog of cat videos. As a managed service in the GCP catalog, anyone can solve data problems on the same scale.

While Bigtable presents an extremely powerful platform for building systems on huge datasets, it does so at the cost of basic database functionality such as transactions and queries. It also only solves the problem of scale at the far end. For most applications, there simply isn't a need for petabytes of data or millions of writes per second. Many of these applications simply need to be solved for persistence in an easy-to-use way that...