Good news, Go programmers: the Go client library for Google Cloud Bigtable is now available.

Cloud Bigtable is a massively scalable NoSQL database that drives many of Google’s most data-intensive applications, including search, Gmail, Google Earth, and YouTube.

The Go programming language is gaining popularity and becoming a favorite tool for building Cloud applications. Now, in addition to the Java HBase API, you can access the power of Cloud Bigtable using an idiomatic Go API.

The Go API has many benefits:
  • Easy to Install: Runing go get google.golang.org/cloud/bigtable will install the required library. There's no step 2.
  • Simple API: The Go client library is a simpler interface than the Java HBase API.
  • Low Level: The API is a thin wrapper around the Cloud Bigtable gRPC interface, so it closely reflects the underlying RPCs. This makes it easy to reason about the performance and cost characteristics of your program.
  • Full access to Cloud Bigtable features: Scans, row filters, conditional mutations, read-modify-write operations, and middle-out compression are all supported.

The Go client is already being used by customers for serious work, so now is a great time to try it out. Check out the sample applications on GitHub, read the docs, and let us know what you think.

- Posted by David Symonds, Software Engineer