Google BigQuery: The Definitive Guide

Preface

Enterprises are becoming increasingly data driven, and a key component of any enterprise’s data strategy is a data warehouse—a central repository of integrated data from all across the company. Traditionally, the data warehouse was used by data analysts to create analytical reports. But now it is also increasingly used to populate real-time dashboards, to make ad hoc queries, and to provide decision-making guidance through predictive analytics. Because of these business requirements for advanced analytics and a trend toward cost control, agility, and self-service data access, many organizations are moving to cloud-based data warehouses such as Google BigQuery.

In this book, we provide a thorough tour of BigQuery, a serverless, highly scalable, low-cost enterprise data warehouse that is available on Google Cloud. Because there is no infrastructure to manage, enterprises can focus on analyzing data to find meaningful insights using familiar SQL.

Our goal with BigQuery has been to build a data platform that provides leading-edge capabilities, takes advantage of the many great technologies that are now available in cloud environments, and supports tried-and-true data technologies that are still relevant today. For example, on the leading edge, Google’s BigQuery is a serverless compute architecture that decouples compute and storage. This enables diverse layers of the architecture to perform and scale independently, and it gives data developers flexibility in design and deployment. ...