Introduction to Google Cloud Bigtable
Bigtable is an internal Google database system that’s so revolutionary that it kickstarted the NoSQL industry. In the mid 2000s, Google had a problem. The web indexes behind its search engine had become massive and it took a long time to keep rebuilding them. The company wanted to build a database that could deliver real-time access to petabytes of data. The result was Bigtable.
Google went on to use Bigtable to power many of its other core services, such as Gmail and Google Maps. Finally, in 2015, it made Cloud Bigtable available as a service that its customers could use for their own applications.
In this lesson, you will learn which of your applications could make use of Bigtable and how to take advantage of its high performance.
Learning Objectives
- Identify the best use cases for Bigtable
- Describe Bigtable’s architecture and storage model
- Optimize query performance through good schema design
- Configure and monitor a Bigtable cluster
- Send commands to Bigtable
Intended Audience
- Data professionals
- People studying for the Google Professional Data Engineer exam
Prerequisites
- Database experience
- Google Cloud Platform account (sign up for free trial at https://cloud.google.com/free if you don’t have an account)
The example code is at https://github.com/cloudacademy/cloud-bigtable-examples/tree/master/java/dataproc-wordcount.