I have a field in Bigtable storing a timestamp. Using cbt lookup, the field displays like this "\x00\x00\x01d\x865W\x00"
This bytestring converts to an integer, for example via Python.
int.from_bytes(b"\x00\x00\x01d\x865W\x00",'big')
1531260000000
1531260000000 is a unix timestamp in microseconds. Converting to a human-readable format gives 2018-07-10T22:00:00+00:00
How can we update this field to a different timestamp using cbt?
From the docs we get the command
cbt set <table> <row> family:column=val
But how should the value be formatted to store it correctly?
I've tried cbt set mytable row1 family:timestamp=1531260000000, but then cbt lookup displays it as 1531260000000, not as a bytestring, and BigQuery does not display it at all, failing because the format is wrong.
I've also tried tried cbt set mytable row1 family:timestamp="\x00\x00\x01d\x865W\x00", but then cbt lookup displays the bytestring with escaped backslashes, which also does not work: "\\x00\\x00\\x01d\\x865W\\x00"
I looked in the source code for cbt but I'm not familiar enough with Go to figure it out from there.
According to this issue, you are not able to pass arbitrary bytes with cbt. The timestamp you provided is handled like a string by cbt, that's why it is escaped.