sheep VS tbls

You can see this in action in a service I wrote many years ago called Sheep. Note, that code is old and kind of a mess, but it should give you a general idea for how to handle distributed counters. That being said, I don't know of a clean way to do this in Dataflow without wiring up a bunch of DoFn's.

Oh, this is an interesting problem that I've solved for personally years ago in a project called Sheep. Note, this project won't work for your specific use case, but the premise is the same. Essentially, you're right that a transaction on a single row would create a hotspot, so what you must do is shard the counter across N rows.

Autogenerated database documentation is often pretty hit and miss but tbls[1] does a pretty good job in that space. Especially when you comment on your tables, fields, views, functions etc (which is a good habit anyway!) the output is quite useful

[1] https://github.com/k1LoW/tbls

In-database comments combined with something like https://github.com/k1LoW/tbls make for very cheap database documentation.

No affiliation with tbls except that I'm a big fan

Check out tbls. You can create a ERD in one command