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.
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Once your data is in PowerPivot, you can easily visualize it back in Excel using PivotTables, charts or both. Here we see a chart bound to the PowerPivot model with our baby name data, featuring several “slicers” above and to the left of the chart.
Slicers let you filter your data and see the chart update automatically. Here we have filtered the query to show data only for the names Abigail and Allison, in the states of AZ, CA, CO and NY, between 1995 and 2005. The slicer at the top contains only girls’ names because we selected “F” (female) in the "Gender" slicer toward the upper-left.
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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?