Rapidly crunching terabytes of big data can lead to better business
decisions, but this has traditionally required tremendous IT investments. Imagine a large
online retailer that wants to provide better product recommendations by analyzing website
usage and purchase patterns from millions of website visits. Or consider a car manufacturer
that wants to maximize its advertising impact by learning how its last global campaign
performed across billions of multimedia impressions. Fortune 500 companies struggle to unlock
the potential of data, so it’s no surprise that it’s been even harder for smaller
businesses.
We developed Google
BigQuery Service for large-scale internal data analytics. At Google
I/O last year, we opened a preview of the service to a limited number of enterprises
and developers. Today we're releasing some big improvements, and putting one of Google's most
powerful data analysis systems into the hands of more companies of all
sizes.
We’ve added a graphical user interface for analysts and developers
to rapidly explore massive data through a web application.
We’ve made big
improvements for customers accessing the service programmatically through the API. The new
REST API lets you run multiple jobs in the background and manage tables and permissions with
more granularity.
Whether you use the BigQuery web application or API, you can now
write even more powerful queries with JOIN statements. This lets you run queries across
multiple data tables, linked by data that tables have in common.
It’s also now easy
to manage, secure, and share access to your data tables in BigQuery, and export query results
to the desktop or to Google
Cloud Storage.
Michael J. Franklin, Professor of Computer Science at UC
Berkeley, remarked
that BigQuery (internally known as Dremel) leverages “thousands of machines to process data at
a scale that is simply jaw-dropping given the current state of the art.” We’re looking forward
to helping businesses innovate faster by harnessing their own large data sets. BigQuery is
available free of charge for now, and we’ll let customers know at least 30 days before the
free period ends. We’re bringing on a new batch of pilot customers, so let
us know if your business wants to test drive BigQuery
Service.
Ju-kay Kwek is a Product Manager for Google
BigQuery Service.
