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Google adds new data analytics and database offerings

For the first time, Google is directly integrating its advertising services with the Google Cloud Platform.
Written by Stephanie Condon, Senior Writer

Google on Thursday rolled out new data analytics and database products, allowing Cloud customers to better manage and more fully exploit their data.

First, the company is introducing a new data transfer service for BigQuery, its data analysis service. Data from Google's advertising products -- namely, Adwords, DoubleClick Campaign Manager, DoubleClick for Publishers and Youtube Analytics -- can now be transferred automatically into BigQuery.

"Once the data's inside BigQuery, that's where further enrichment happens," Brian Stevens, VP of Cloud Platform for Google Cloud, said during Thursday's keynote address at the Google Next conference in San Francisco.

This new capability represents the first direct integration with Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Google's advertising services, making it "really easy for marketing teams to become empowered and build marketing analytics inside GCP," Stevens said.

It also gives Google a compelling way to sell its cloud services to its existing advertising customers.

"If you think about Google, for the last 18 years, we've been working with enterprise customers, essentially getting them to advertise," Fausto Ibarra, director of product management for Google Cloud, said to ZDNet. "Any one of those customers can now become a Google Cloud user. We're giving them a solution to optimize their marketing mix, understand their customers better... We're expanding the reach of Google Cloud significantly."

Google is also enhancing BigQuery with a new commercial data sets program. It allows customers to simply transfer data from multiple commercial data providers into BigQuery. Google's unveiling the program with a list of initial partners: Xignite will provide financial markets data, HouseCanary will provide residential real-estate valuations, Remine will offer predictions on house sales, AccuWeather will provide historical weather data and Down Jones offers news stories.

Next, Google is integrating BigQuery with Cloud BigTable, the real time, low latency database. While BigTable is used to track fast-moving data like financial information, BigQuery is more typically used for interactive analytics. Now, a customer can BigQuery to quickly find insights from their data already stored in BigTable.

Google is also offering a new product called Cloud Dataprep -- a serverless data preparation tool that helps to quickly ready data for immediate analysis or machine learning. Typically, data has to be manually cleaned up before it's analyzed, but Dataprep simplifies the process by automatically detecting schemas, types, joins and anomalies such as missing values. With machine learning, it also suggests different ways of cleaning the data.

Cloud Dataprep is a serverless data preparation tool from Google.

Google

The aim of these tools, Stevens said, is to build a streaming data analytics pipeline.

"Never will you be managing infrastructure... you'll just get right to the mission at hand, you'll just be analyzing data," he said.

Meanwhile, Google also announced that Cloud SQL now supports PostreSQL. Cloud SQL is a fully-managed service, making it easier to set up, maintain, manage, and administer PostgreSQL relational databases on Google Cloud Platform. Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL will be available in the Google Cloud Console by March 13th, 2017.

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