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Connecting to Cloud Bigtable with HBase Shell

Cloud Bigtable is a fully managed NoSQL database service designed to handle massive amounts of information. One of Cloud Bigtable’s true strengths is its adherence to support for the open-source industry standard HBase API. In this hands-on lab, you’ll configure database instances and clusters for Cloud Bigtable in the console. Then you'll use HBase shell commands to create a schema and populate the table with data.

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Path Info

Level
Clock icon Beginner
Duration
Clock icon 30m
Last updated
Clock icon Aug 25, 2025

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Table of Contents

  1. Challenge

    Enable API

    1. From the main navigation menu, choose APIs & Services. Then select Library.
    2. In the search field, enter "Bigtable".
    3. Select the Cloud Bigtable Table Admin API card.
    4. Click Enable.

  2. Challenge

    Create Bigtable Instance

    1. From the main navigation, choose Bigtable in the Storage section.
    2. Choose Create instance.
    3. Set the following fields:
      • Name: "la-data-hbase"
      • Instance type: Development
      • Storage type: HDD
      • Cluster Region: us-east1
      • Cluster Zone: us-east-1d
    4. Click Done and then Create.

  3. Challenge

    Install and Start HBase Shell

    1. Activate the Cloud Shell by clicking its icon in the top row.

    2. In the Cloud Shell, clone an existing repository from GitHub for Google Cloud Platform from https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/cloud-bigtable-examples.git and checkout the "ee436eb" branch.

    3. Install and set your Cloud Shell instance to use Java version 8 for compatibility with this version of HBase.

    4. Start the HBase shell.

  4. Challenge

    Create Data Table and Column Family

    1. Create a Bigtable table "la-table" with a column family "offerings".
    2. Review the results.

  5. Challenge

    Define Table Structure and Add Data

    1. Create the table qualifier and first cell of the Bigtable table.
    2. View the data in the table.
    3. Add a second cell to the same column family.
    4. Review results.

  6. Challenge

    Delete Bigtable Instance

    1. From the console, select the Bigtable instance.
    2. Choose Delete instance.
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