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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Google describes BigQuery as a column store database that works well for OLAP (OnLine Analytical Processing) queries. Microsoft PowerPivot, a free add-in for Excel 2010, precisely fits that description as well and can import from CSV files just fine. Here’s what the data looks like once it’s in PowerPivot. Throwing large datasets in PowerPivot will give you far better performance than storing the same data directly in a spreadsheet.
One very powerful aspect of PowerPivot is its use of data compression. The CSV file containing the six states’ baby data was over 20MB. The Excel workbook containing the PowerPivot model with that same data was less than 1MB.
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- 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?