BigQuery

The amount of data that even a relatively low volume website can generate is huge. Once you add in analytics, business metrics, demographics, user profiles and multiple devices, it can become overwhelming. Many organizations use data warehouses as a repository with data being sucked in from all parts of the organization. The challenge here is that these often turn into “Data Fortresses.” Even getting timely business metrics becomes a challenge, let alone running exploratory queries across the entire data set. Technologies like the cloud based BigQuery help. The pay-as-you-go model and the ability to do ad hoc queries lets you gain insight without buying specialist hardware and software. A data-driven business should put data in the hands of the decision makers, not hidden behind technological barriers and bureaucracy.

Google’s BigQuery brings data analytics to the cloud. Rather than loading data into an expensive data-warehouse with predefined indexes, BigQuery allows you to upload and investigate a data set through ad-hoc SQL-like queries. This is a great way to create a cheap proof-of-concept or even a complete application, as processing of hundreds of gigabytes of data by thousands of servers happens in seconds.