That's not exactly true, bigtable still has some indexes. You're just restricted to one per table and only on the row key. Instead you spend time finding the

That's not exactly true, bigtable still has some indexes. You're just restricted to one per table and only on the row key. Instead you spend time finding the right row keys for each value that you're going to want to look up. Picking bad keys will still lead you to have terrible performance, since you'll be looking up the wrong thing to get what you actually want.