Now in BigQuery: batch queries and a connector for Excel
By Ryan Boyd, Developer Advocate for Cloud Data Services
Businesses and developers are using BigQuery to solve a wide variety of use cases – from
optimizing advertising campaigns, to spotting inventory shortfalls, to understanding customer
behavior. Accommodating these varied use cases requires BigQuery to be flexible, both for the
developers integrating applications with the API and for the analysts running ad-hoc queries.
Today we’ve made it more flexible by adding batch queries and a connector for Microsoft
Excel.
Batch priority queries
BigQuery was designed for ad-hoc, iterative analytics on millions-to-billions of rows of data.
When you’re diving into your data to gain insights, you want your queries to run in seconds
rather than waiting minutes or hours. Sometimes our customers don’t need these fast responses
when they’re running nightly jobs to update dashboards or reports, but want to use the same
BigQuery technology and underlying datasets for these queries. We’ve now added batch pricing
to accommodate these developers, allowing them to run their queries at a
significantly lower
cost.
Here’s how to set the priority to ‘batch’ when submitting a new query via the Google APIs
Client Library for Java:
Job job =
new Job();
JobConfiguration config =
new JobConfiguration();
JobConfigurationQuery queryConfig = new
JobConfigurationQuery();
config.setQuery(queryConfig);
job.setConfiguration(config);
queryConfig.setQuery(querySql);
queryConfig.setPriority("BATCH");
com.google.api.services.bigquery.Bigquery.Jobs.Insert insert =
bigquery.jobs().insert(projectId,
job);
Batch queries will execute between 30 minutes and 3 hours after they are
submitted. See more information in our
Developers
Guide.
BigQuery Connector for Excel
Spreadsheets are a popular tool for analysts, executives and and developers to explore data.
Last year we launched the ability for users of Google Spreadsheets to execute BigQuery queries
using the
Google Apps
Script integration. Today, we’re launching the BigQuery Connector for Excel, which
allows Microsoft Excel users to do the same with the ‘External Data’ functionality built into
the product. Once the BigQuery results are in Excel, you can easily make pivot tables, create
charts and integrate it with data from other sources. If you’re interested, you can
try it right now!
Let us know what you think of these new features and what else you’d like to see in the
roadmap by reaching out on
Google+. We’ll also be
holding
office hours this
Friday
at 10 AM PDT on Google Developers Live to talk about these new features and answer
any questions you have about BigQuery.
Microsoft and Excel are registered trademarks of Microsoft
Corporation
Ryan Boyd is a Developer Advocate, focused on cloud data services. He's been at
Google for 6 years and previously helped build out the Google Apps ISV ecosystem. He published
his first book "Getting Started with OAuth 2.0" with O'Reilly.
Posted by Scott Knaster,
Editor
