What is BigQuery & Data Warehouse?

A comprehensive guide to BigQuery and Data Warehousing

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Overview

Let’s explore BigQuery, Google’s fully managed serverless data warehouse service, and understand its key features and benefits.

What is BigQuery?

BigQuery is Google’s fully managed serverless enterprise data warehouse service.

It comes with a built-in query engine that makes it easy to execute SQL queries and helps organizations analyze large amounts of data to find meaningful insights.

What is a Data Warehouse?

A Data Warehouse (DW) is a large centralized data repository that supports business intelligence (BI) activities, including data analysis, reporting, and decision-making.

Data is structured and organized to support business intelligence activities such as data mining, analytics, and reporting.

Data Warehouse

Why Do We Need a Data Warehouse?

While it might seem simpler to query databases directly for analysis, this approach can cause performance issues on production databases.
Although you could create analysis-specific database copies, this process can be cumbersome and inefficient.

Modern enterprises need:

Key Features and Benefits of BigQuery

1. Fully Managed Serverless

2. High-Speed Real-Time Analysis

3. Cost-Effective

Pricing Structure:

Note: While BigQuery is cost-effective, be cautious with SELECT queries as costs are based on the amount of data processed, not query runtime.

4. Security & Integration

5. Machine Learning & Data Sharing


Summary

In the next posting, we will explain the Data ETL process using BigQuery and DataFlow.



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