What is BigQuery?

BigQuery is Google Cloud’s enterprise data warehouse, designed to help users ingest, store, visualize, and analyze data. BigQuery enables users to unlock insights across petabyte-sized datasets and enables business agility. In this chapter, we will explore BigQuery to give you a complete understanding of how the service operates so you can best utilize BigQuery to prepare and explore your data.

BigQuery’s managed serverless infrastructure unlocks users from managing resources and allows for greater focus on data. BigQuery is a serverless enterprise data warehouse with analytic tools and machine learning services, with multi-cloud capabilities. BigQuery stores data in a columnar format that is optimized for analytics queries on structured and semi-structured data.

There are several ways to get data into BigQuery. You can ingest data into BigQuery by uploading it in one-time or scheduled batch loads or by streaming data to enable real-time insights...