BigtableIO: is it really experimental?

[Israel Herraiz <ih...@google.com>]

Hi,

I have been working lately quite a lot with Dataflow and Bigtable, using
Beam's BigtableIO.

The documentation (
https://beam.apache.org/releases/javadoc/2.17.0/org/apache/beam/sdk/io/gcp/bigtable/BigtableIO.html)
shows that BigtableIO is annotated as experimental.

The same docs also says that: *this connector for Cloud Bigtable is
considered experimental and may break or receive backwards-incompatible
changes in future versions of the Apache Beam SDK. Cloud Bigtable is in
Beta, and thus it may introduce breaking changes in future revisions of its
service or APIs.*

However, Bigtable went out of beta in 2016 (
https://cloud.google.com/bigtable/docs/release-notes#June_29_2016) and many
of the client libraries (all?) are in GA too (Java went out of beta on
September ->
https://cloud.google.com/bigtable/docs/release-notes#September_25_2019).

So I am wondering if BigtableIO is truly experimental, and whether I should
submit a pull request updating the comment about Cloud Bigtable being in
beta.

Kind regards,
Israel

Re: BigtableIO: is it really experimental?

[Chamikara Jayalath <ch...@google.com>]

Hi Israel,

I don't see BigTableIO APIs changing at this point. So I won't call it
truly experimental. However we have another BigTable connector that uses
the HBase API available here.
https://github.com/googleapis/java-bigtable-hbase/tree/master/bigtable-dataflow-parent/bigtable-hbase-beam

This one was developed and is supported by the Cloud BigTable team. So I
recommend using that one unless you have a strong reason to use the one in
Beam.

Thanks,
Cham

On Mon, Jan 20, 2020 at 3:07 PM Israel Herraiz <ih...@google.com> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I have been working lately quite a lot with Dataflow and Bigtable, using
> Beam's BigtableIO.
>
> The documentation (
> https://beam.apache.org/releases/javadoc/2.17.0/org/apache/beam/sdk/io/gcp/bigtable/BigtableIO.html)
> shows that BigtableIO is annotated as experimental.
>
> The same docs also says that: *this connector for Cloud Bigtable is
> considered experimental and may break or receive backwards-incompatible
> changes in future versions of the Apache Beam SDK. Cloud Bigtable is in
> Beta, and thus it may introduce breaking changes in future revisions of its
> service or APIs.*
>
> However, Bigtable went out of beta in 2016 (
> https://cloud.google.com/bigtable/docs/release-notes#June_29_2016) and
> many of the client libraries (all?) are in GA too (Java went out of beta on
> September ->
> https://cloud.google.com/bigtable/docs/release-notes#September_25_2019).
>
> So I am wondering if BigtableIO is truly experimental, and whether I
> should submit a pull request updating the comment about Cloud Bigtable
> being in beta.
>
> Kind regards,
> Israel
>