I want to be able to easily create test data files that I can save and re-load into a dev Bigtable instance at will, and pass to other members of my team so they can do the same. The suggested way of using Dataflow to Bigtable seems ridiculously heavy-weight (anyone loading a new type of data--not for production purposes, even just playing around with Bigtable for the first time--needs to know Apache Beam, Dataflow, Java, and Maven??--that's potentially going to limit Bigtable adoption for my team) and my data isn't already in HBase so I can't just export a sequencefile.
However, per this document, it seems like the sequencefile key for HBase should be constructible in regular Java/Scala/Python code:
The HBase Key consists of: the row key, column family, column qualifier, timestamp and a type.
It just doesn't go into enough detail for me to actually do it. What delimiters exist between the different parts of the key? (This is my main question).
From there, Spark at least has a method to write a sequencefile so I think I should be able to create the files I want as long as I can construct the keys.
I'm aware that there's an alternative (described in this answer, whose example link is broken) that would involve writing a script to spin up a Dataproc cluster, push a TSV file there, and use HBase ImportTsv to push the data to Bigtable. This also seems overly heavy-weight to me but maybe I'm just not used to the cloud world yet.
