Introduction to SQL in Bigtable

In addition to its Admin and Data APIs, Bigtable supports SQL queries. You can use SQL to query your Bigtable data in the following ways:

• For low-latency application development, GoogleSQL for Bigtable
• For batch processing and ETL, Spark SQL
• To analyze data from multiple sources, BigQuery

GoogleSQL for Bigtable

Preview

This product or feature is subject to the "Pre-GA Offerings Terms" in the General Service Terms section of the Service Specific Terms. Pre-GA products and features are available "as is" and might have limited support. For more information, see the launch stage descriptions.

GoogleSQL is a query language used by multiple Google Cloud services, including Spanner and BigQuery. You can create and run GoogleSQL queries in Bigtable Studio in the Google Cloud console, or you can run them programmatically using the Bigtable client library for Java.

GoogleSQL for Bigtable is similar to the Cassandra query Language (CQL) in many ways, and it includes a map data type, designed to query the Bigtable data stored in column families, columns, and cells.

To get started, see the GoogleSQL for Bigtable overview.

Spark SQL

For data science use cases or other batch processing and ETL, the Bigtable Spark connector lets you read and write Bigtable data using Spark SQL. For more information, see Use the Bigtable Spark connector.

BigQuery

If you want to blend data from multiple sources, including Bigtable, and run batch, ad hoc analytics, you can create BigQuery external tables and run SQL queries from BigQuery. For more information, see Query and analyze Bigtable data with BigQuery.

What's next

• Learn how to run queries in the Google Cloud console without SQL.
• Explore the GoogleSQL for Bigtable reference documentation.