BigQuery basics

BigQuery is the data warehouse of Google Analytics. It is basically a fully managed, petabyte and low-cost tool. BigQuery is NoOps: the term NoOps (short for no operation) identifies an IT environment so automated and abstracted from the underlying infrastructure that does not require a dedicated team to manage the software internally. In fact, in BigQuery there is no infrastructure to manage and a database administrator is not required. The time saved can be used to analyze data in order to find meaningful information. To form queries in BigQuery we can use a familiar SQL syntax, very simple to learn, and extremely effective. But the real convenience in using this technology comes from the actual savings due to the pay-as-you-go model that allows us to pay only for the actual use of the resources needed to perform a specific analysis.

To access BigQuery we can essentially use three modes:

• Using a graphical web UI
• Using a command-line tool
• Using API or client libraries

In this chapter, we will only analyze the operation of BigQuery through a graphical interface.