Google opens BigQuery cloud analytics to all

Google is making its BigQuery cloud analytics service generally available, almost two years after it was first trialled.

The analytics tool, which lets developers mine databases of up to 2TB in size, is now open to businesses, Google announced on Tuesday. Companies can query up to 100GB of data per month for free, though they will need to pay for storage.

"BigQuery enables businesses and developers to gain real-time business insights from massive amounts of data without any upfront hardware or software investments," Ju-kay Kwek, a product manager for BigQuery, wrote in a blog post. "Imagine a big pharmaceutical company optimising daily marketing spend using worldwide sales and advertisement data."

The technology was launched as an invite-only beta at the Google I/O conference in May 2010 and went into a limited beta in November 2011.

Pricing for storage starts at $0.12 (£0.07) per gigabyte, per month, with a limit of 2TB. Queries cost $0.035 per gigabyte processed with a limit of 1,000 queries per day and 20TB of processed data per day. However, these are not hard limits and Google advises companies that want to crunch more information to contact a sales representative.

The product falls into the nascent class of technologies known as 'analytics-as-a-service'. It will compete with platform-as-a-service products from companies like Red Hat, Microsoft and VMware, along with some of Amazon Web Services's analytics products, like the Elastic MapReduce Hadoop-clone.