Google BigQuery: Self-service cloud data analysis, from your iPad or desktop
Summary: Google made its BigQuery service publicly available last month. So I decided to put it through its paces, and compare it to Microsoft’s Excel and PowerPivot.
Image 1 of 11
Google made its BigQuery service public on May 1st. Though the name sounds like “Big Data,” Google’s offering is really a self-service Business Intelligence (BI) solution, hosted in the cloud. In this gallery, I'll tell you how it works.
BigQuery is a cloud-based data analytics system from Google. It lets you upload data, then analyze it using SQL (Structured Query Language) as the query interface. BigQuery lets you query up to 100GB of data per month for free. Just create a Google Developer account for yourself, create a new project and enable BigQuery within it.
Click on any image to enlarge.
Source: Google
Kick off your day with ZDNet's daily email newsletter. It's the freshest tech news and opinion, served hot. Get it.
Talkback
Data privacy?
- Lisa
http://www.hireamobileappdeveloper.com/
BigQuery or PowerPivot
So I can load data into BigQuery using CSV, export it out as CSV, import the CSV into Excel, then use PowerPivot to actually do analytics.
Why not just go from CSV directly into Excel? What value is BigQuery bringing to the process; other than turning over my data to Google and giving me a query interface (but not a visualization interface) that will work on an iPad?
PowerPivot or BigQuery
When you ask "Why not just go from CSV directly into Excel?", I suppose that is one of the questions I wanted to provoke you to think about. Would you rather use something like PowerPivot + Excel on your desktop, or would you prefer to stay cloud + browser (and SQL) based and use BigQuery? What's your take? Does the cloud trump the desktop + Excel?