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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To run a Query, type it in, then click the “RUN QUERY” button or just tap Ctrl-Enter on your keyboard. While the query is running, the query text area is disabled and the elapsed query time clock runs up, right next to the “Query running” label.
BigQuery does not permit “SELECT *”-style queries; instead, you must specify all column names. And although you’ll be querying large datasets, you will want to keep your result sets small. To do that, make use of aggregating queries (using aggregate functions and GROUP BY) and/or the LIMIT n clause at the end of your query as was done here (i.e. “LIMIT 200” appears at the end of the query).
Tables are identified using a syntax of datasetname.tablename. If you reference any table from the samples dataset, you’ll need to use the “publicdata:” prefix before the “samples” dataset name.
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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?