Bigtable Skill

This skill provides core workflows and guidance for administering and developing with Google Bigtable.

Core Principles

• Control Plane vs. Data Plane:
  • Use gcloud for Control Plane operations: Manage Instances, Clusters, App Profiles, Backups and IAM. Create Tables, Logical Views, Materialized Views and Authorized Views.
  • Use cbt for Data Plane operations: Update Tables, Column Families, and reading/writing data.
• Performance First: Bigtable is a NoSQL database. Efficiency is tied to Row Key design. Always warn about Full Table Scans.
• Client Selection: For production use cases, Java or Go are preferred for their superior performance and feature coverage compared to other languages.
• Observability: When diagnosing performance or hotspotting, ALWAYS mention Key Visualizer (via Cloud Console) as the primary diagnostic tool, followed by hot-tablets tool and table stats in gcloud CLI and include-stats=full option under cbt read to diagnose slow queries.

[!IMPORTANT] Safety Rule: Always obtain explicit user confirmation before making non-emulator database changes.

Quick Recipes