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Google Cloud Bigtable

Bigtable is a fully managed scalable NoSQL database service for large analytical and operational workloads with up to 99.999% availability.

The customer decides when and to what scale BigTable operates at. For example the number of nodes that are running and hdd vs ssd are customisable by the user.

BigTable overview

What is NoSQL?

At its core NoSQL is a key value store.

Bigtable

Intro to Bigtable

Bigtable can be used as an application backend directly.

Field promotion is a way to reduce hotspotting

Bigtable should contain a minumum of 1TB of data

Big table indexes are called row keys

To increase queries per second, add more nodes to Bigtable.

Bigtable is a great data source for map reduce style operations. Bigtable integrates with Hadoop, dataproc and dataflow.

There are 2 main tools which can be used to interact with Cloud Bigtable, these are:

  1. Cloud Bigtable cbt tool - link
  2. HBase shell for Cloud Bigtable - link

Google recommends the cbt tool in instances when either of these tools is an option to use.