Table Admin API

After creating an Instance , you can interact with individual tables, groups of tables or column families within a table.

List Tables

If you want a comprehensive list of all existing tables in a instance, make a ListTables API request with Instance.list_tables() :

 >>> instance.list_tables()
[<google.cloud.bigtable.table.Table at 0x7ff6a1de8f50>,
 <google.cloud.bigtable.table.Table at 0x7ff6a1de8350>] 

Table Factory

To create a Table object:

 table = instance.table(table_id) 

Even if this Table already has been created with the API, you’ll want this object to use as a parent of a ColumnFamily or Row .

Create a new Table

After creating the table object, make a CreateTable API request with create() :

 table.create() 

If you would like to initially split the table into several tablets (tablets are similar to HBase regions):

 table.create(initial_split_keys=['s1', 's2']) 

Delete an existing Table

Make a DeleteTable API request with delete() :

 table.delete() 

List Column Families in a Table

Though there is no officialmethod for retrieving column families associated with a table, the GetTable API method returns a table object with the names of the column families.

To retrieve the list of column families use list_column_families() :

 column_families = table.list_column_families() 

Column Family Factory

To create a ColumnFamily object:

 column_family = table.column_family(column_family_id) 

There is no real reason to use this factory unless you intend to create or delete a column family.

In addition, you can specify an optional gc_rule (a GarbageCollectionRule or similar):

 column_family = table.column_family(column_family_id,
                                    gc_rule=gc_rule) 

This rule helps the backend determine when and how to clean up old cells in the column family.

See Column Families for more information about GarbageCollectionRule and related classes.

Create a new Column Family

After creating the column family object, make a CreateColumnFamily API request with ColumnFamily.create()

 column_family.create() 

Delete an existing Column Family

Make a DeleteColumnFamily API request with ColumnFamily.delete()

 column_family.delete() 

Update an existing Column Family

Make an UpdateColumnFamily API request with ColumnFamily.delete()

 column_family.update() 

Next Step

Now we go down the final step of the hierarchy from Table to Row as well as streaming data directly via a Table .

Head next to learn about the Data API .