Bigfoot

What Is It?

Bigfoot is a zero-setup, multi-tenant content and metadata storage facility capable of storing and querying across very large datasets

How Does It Work

The data in Bigfoot is partitioned into multiple stores. A store consists of two “boxes” – a contentbox designed for unstructured or binary blobs and a metabox designed for holding richly structured metadata. The metadata in the metabox may be about the content in the contentbox or it may be unrelated. The metabox is implemented as an RDF triple store. As content is added to the contentbox metadata is automatically extracted from it and stored in the associated metabox. Bigfoot allows querying of the metabox directly using Sparql or of the contentbox using store-specific indexes. Stores can be aggregated in a number of configurations to allow querying across groups of stores.

An instance is a single installation of the Bigfoot software on a single computer. Each instance may manage multiple stores and these stores can be configured to replicate between specific instances for redundancy, resilience or performance. A Bigfoot node consists of one or more physical instances of the Bigfoot software that act as a single unit. Bigfoot automatically manages the replication relationships between the instances in the node based on capacity and performance characteristics of each instance.

Bigfoot can be deployed in two primary configurations: single-tenant and multi-tenant. In a single-tenant configuration Bigfoot is restricted to a single account which is assumed to be the owner of the Bigfoot node.

General Principles

Metadata in the metabox is usually about content in the contentbox, but it is not restricted to being solely about the contentbox.