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Google has integrated its BigQuery data warehouse technology for large-scale data analytics with Google Drive.
Starting this week, businesses using BigQuery will be able to save their query results directly from the data warehouse user interface to Google Sheets.
The integration will let BigQuery users query files from Google Drive, without having to load the files into the data warehouse as was required until now, Google BigQuery technical program manager Tino Tereshko posted on the company’s Cloud Big Data and Machine Learning Blog.
Users can now update information in Big Query by linking a Google Sheet directly into the data warehouse, the blog noted. Similarly, the integration allows them to run queries from BigQuery against data in Sheets even as the data is being edited in the spreadsheet app.
A key benefit of integrating the two technologies is that data in Google Sheets can now serve as BigQuery tables, Tereshko said. “Time after time, we can make changes within our Google Sheets spreadsheet, and BigQuery will automatically pick up the changes next time we run a query against the spreadsheet,” the Google program manager noted.
BigQuery is a managed data warehouse for running petabyte-scale data analytics. Google has positioned the service for organizations looking for relatively low-cost, highly scalable analytics capabilities and that don’t want to build and maintain an internal infrastructure to achieve that.
Google offers a pay-as-you-go model for the service that it says lets smaller organizations have access to sophisticated data analytics capabilities just as easily as larger well-resourced ones. It also charges separately for the storage and compute components giving users more flexibility in how they scale and pay for each component.
Earlier this year, Google introduced a long-term storage pricing option for BigQuery under which data that is stored in the warehouse for an extended period of time—defined as 90-days—automatically qualifies for a 50 percent discount in storage prices. Instead of paying $0.02 per GB of stored data per month, organizations pay $0.01 for every GB that is stored in BigQuery for more than 90 days.
Along with the new prices, Google also announced a new storage engine, internally referred to as Capacitor, that it claimed would boost query performance from 10 to 1,000 times. In addition, the company launched a newly rebuilt pipeline dubbed Poseidon that it said improves data input and output performance by a factor of five.
Google has said that its BigQuery’s customers range from relatively small startups to Fortune 500 companies.
The integration between BigQuery and Drive, a critical component of the Google Apps suite of productivity apps, is part of a broader effort by the company to increase interoperability between key enterprise products, including its Cloud Platform, Chrome, Android and Apps. The company has noted that its goal in bringing these products together is to encourage broader adoption by enterprises looking for integrated technology suites.