Google BigQuery Analytics

Chapter 14Querying Google Data Sources

For users of certain Google services, BigQuery enables more direct access to their data contained in the service. The current set of services supporting BigQuery enhanced access includes:

• Google Analytics
• AdSense
• Google Cloud Storage (GCS)

These services, as part of their core functionality, have dashboards that enable you to access summarized views of your data with varying degrees of customization available in their interfaces. What is generally true is that a fair amount of aggregation is applied to the underlying data in your account before it is rendered. These views are designed to cover the common use cases. However, if you have more advanced analysis requirements, especially if you need to combine the data in the service with external data sources, you end up wanting direct access to the data. These services support using BigQuery to give access to the un-aggregated data. Note that this has the advantage that you do not have to download the data to perform useful analysis. For heavy users of these services, this is quite important because the volume of data collected by these services can be substantial, and simply downloading and storing the full data can be challenging, to say nothing of analyzing it efficiently. Of course, you can still use BigQuery to export or download your data if required.

Unfortunately, the access method is not at all uniform across these services, so each of the services just listed is covered in a separate ...