Google BigQuery, the enterprise level database for home users

You can still get access to the tool prior invite, but the time where Google BigQuery will be available to the public is getting closer.

What is BigQuery?

With its slogan “Analyze terabytes of data with a simple click or a single call to the API” everybody IT centric should have been now able to understand what BigQuery is.

The project consists into a data analysis system integrated with the other main Google solutions, dedicated to the enterprise market and providing breath-taking execution speed.

More in detail, it is a service for running SQL-like queries against very large datasets, with potentially billions of rows. This can be your own data, or data that someone else has given you access to and you may import into the system as CSV data and manipulate with SELECT statements only.

BigQuery has born as an OLAP service, so an online analytical processing system, but it is of course not intended to replace any of your existing database due to the lack of functionality available (e.g. other SQL statements).

If that was your main intent, perhaps you should consider something different, like Google Cloud SQL if you want to stay with the Google services.

Thanks to the most recent updated document revision, you would be able to get an interesting overview of the capabilities of the tool which may be used both via the API as well as from the front-end system.

According to Google, the project’s targets are the SME, those that for budget reasons cannot have access to effective data analysis tools. But as usual, I would imagine that any other corporate is the most welcome customer for Google.

Although it is impossible to make quantitative predictions, it is already known that the use of BigQuery will pay itself, conceivably with different forms depending on customer needs.

The question of “quantum” was well summarized by Dave Girouard, vice president of the compartment and president of Google applications and enterprise that said:

“This is one of those things for which in the past you had to spend an incredible amount of money. It is one of the benefits of cloud: an infrastructure that could cost five million dollars a few years ago now costs less than half a million.”

However, in my opinion, the real benefit it will be full product integration that BigQuery have with the rest of the Google Suite. Try to imagine a spreadsheet that query a few billion tuples returning result into a Google spreadsheet within a second and online.

This is amazing, and it will fill the gap even for those “home users” that will decide to adopt the Google Chromebook as their next laptop.

From an SEO perspective can BigQuery be useful?

I have to admit that I haven’t been invited to any demo session to actively test the product, but in a quite a few occasions being a Mac users I got stuck because I was needing a database to perform more complex benchmarking queries around my ranking and feeds data and I have to run the virtual machine where Microsoft Access was installed.

If at that time I have been able to get access to BigQuery, I would certainly use it.

I don’t think there is anything else that can be added at this stage, but I do embed this interesting video presentation about made at the Google I/O. The video is quite long, so fasten your seat belts.