Welcome to the “Introduction to Google Cloud Bigtable” course. My name’s Guy Hummel and I’ll be showing you how to use this powerful database service. I’m the Google Cloud Content Lead at Cloud Academy. If you have any questions, feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn and send me a message, or send an email to support@cloudacademy.com.

This course is intended for data professionals, especially those who need to design and build big data processing systems. This is an important course to take if you’re studying for the Google Professional Data Engineer exam.

To get the most from this course, you should have some experience with databases, although it’s not strictly required. Also, if you don’t already have a Google Cloud account, then I recommend that you sign up for a free trial, so you can try using Bigtable yourself. I’ll warn you, though, that you need to be careful with Bigtable, because you can burn through the $300 of free credits pretty quickly if you leave Bigtable running for too long.

Bigtable is an internal Google database system that’s so revolutionary that it kickstarted the NoSQL industry. In the mid 2000’s, 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.

In 2006, Google released a research paper describing Bigtable, which gave people outside of Google ideas that led to the creation of HBase, Cassandra, and other popular NoSQL databases. Ten years later, this paper received the SIGOPS Hall of Fame Award for being one of the most influential papers in the previous decade.

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 Bigtable available as a service that its customers could use for their own applications.

In this course, we’ll start by going over the best uses for Bigtable. Next, we’ll look at its architecture and storage model. Then you’ll see how to optimize performance by designing a good schema and configuring a cluster.

After that, we’ll go over how to increase security through access control. And finally, I’ll show you how to run a Hadoop job that writes its results to Bigtable. During that exercise, you’ll also see how to send commands to Bigtable, monitor its performance, and understand its pricing.

By the end of this course, you should be able to 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, and send commands to Bigtable.

We’d love to get your feedback on this course, so please let us know what you think on the Comments tab below or by emailing support@cloudacademy.com.

Now, if you’re ready to learn how to get the most out of Cloud Bigtable, then let’s get started.