Google BigQuery Analytics

Chapter 13Using BigQuery from Third-Party Tools

BigQuery was designed to be a platform for Big Data analytics that you could layer other tools on top of, rather than an all-in-one Big Data solution. A number of third parties have built tools on top of BigQuery to extend its capabilities. Some of these tools enable you to make BigQuery work just like your on-premise relational database, visualize your data in the cloud, or access your data from scientific applications. This chapter walks you through several of these types of tools; the goal is to show a little bit of what they can do and how they integrate with BigQuery.

There are three parts to this chapter:

• BigQuery adapters: If you currently use ODBC or JDBC to connect to your database, you can use BigQuery without writing any code just by using the Simba ODBC driver. This section also discusses client-side encryption.
• Scientific data processing: R is the de facto standard for scientific data analysis. See how to use the bigrquery R package to connect to BigQuery from R. Also see BigQuery in the Python Data Analysis Library (aka pandas).
• Data visualization: See how to visualize your BigQuery data using two popular commercial applications: Tableau and BIME.

These are only a representative sampling of the third-party tools that integrate with BigQuery. Google keeps track of a number of them at https://developers.google.com/bigquery/third-party-tools. There is also a handy BigQuery subreddit (http://reddit.com/r/bigquery) that ...