Chapter 3
Using Big Data from the Google Cloud
IN THIS CHAPTER
Learning how to get access to really big data
Learning how to use the Google Cloud BigQuery
Building your first queries
Visualizing some results with MatPlotLib
Up to this point, we have been dealing with some relatively small sets of data. Now we are going to use some big data — in some cases, very big data that change every hour!
Sometimes we are working on a powerful enough computer that we can download a large dataset like these, but not every big dataset can be downloaded. For that matter, not all datasets legally can be downloaded. And in the case of the air quality database, you would have download a new version every hour. In cases like those, it’s better to leave the data where it is and use the cloud to do the work.
One interesting ramification of doing the heavy lifting in the cloud is that your computer doesn’t have to be very big or fast. Just let the cloud do the database and analysis work.
What Is Big Data?
Big data refers to datasets that are too large or complex to be dealt with using traditional data-processing ...
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