What is Google BigQuery? (And How Does It Impact Business Intelligence)

DashboardFox - Dashboards and Reports for Google BigQuery

Google BigQuery is Google’s data warehousing platform that promises faster data access and analysis by using Google’s infrastructure. Businesses using it can get valuable insights from their data and improve their decision-making abilities in a fraction of the time.

This article will answer the question: what is Google BigQuery, and how does it impact business intelligence?

What is Google BigQuery?

When companies don’t have the right hardware and infrastructure, storing and querying vast amounts of data can be challenging, time-consuming, and expensive.

Google BigQuery solves this problem. It’s an enterprise data warehouse that enables companies to perform rapid SQL queries using the processing power of Google’s infrastructure. The Google BigQuery data warehouse offers faster processing of an SQL query to companies and businesses without hassles on their end.

By design, its columnar storage paradigm allows for much faster data scanning, and its tree architecture model improves the efficiency and ease of querying and aggregating results.

In addition, it’s serverless and designed to be highly scalable while also being fully managed with storage optimization, which is a good thing in analytics and something a data analyst would like.

Why Pick Google BigQuery Over Other Technologies?

Now that we’ve dealt with what Google BigQuery is, the obvious question is why companies should pick it over other BI tools and technologies. To answer this question, we’ll look at some areas where Google BigQuery may be better than other similar technologies.

These areas are:

Pricing. What sets Google apart from other similar platforms is that it only offers one type of pricing plan. With this plan, businesses pay monthly based on their usage, and the minimum usage is 10 minutes, which is rounded off to the nearest minute.

They also pay flat fees for storage. In contrast, a platform like Amazon offers several complex pricing plans, and it rounds pricing off to the nearest hour, which makes it more expensive.

In addition, Google also offers committed use discounts to businesses that commit their usage for one or three years. And compared to an on-premises deployment with SQL Server, there’s simply no comparison on costs.

Speed. Although other platforms may offer more features, Google leads many of them when it comes to speed. And it’s no secret that speed improves performance significantly.

It also allows more data processing in less time, so, in the process, businesses end up saving money. The BigQuery architecture allows them to process marketing data which will be useful for generating marketing analytics.

Live Migration. Compared to other services, Google offers live migration, allowing businesses to access their data and virtual machines. This allows businesses to repair and update their software without rebooting any virtual machines or losing access to their data.

What Are its Benefits?

We’ve now shown why businesses should consider Google BigQuery over other technologies. So, what are some benefits that businesses will enjoy if they do?

For one, businesses will be able to query streaming data in real-time. In this way, they’ll get up-to-date information on all their business processes, and, with built-in machine learning, they’ll be easily able to predict business outcomes. This, ultimately, allows them to improve their business processes and generate more revenue.

Another benefit of Google BigQuery is that businesses will securely access and share valuable insights into their business processes across the entire organization. As such, they’ll be able to create stunning reports and rich dashboards using many popular business intelligence tools.

Last but not least, when using Google BigQuery, businesses will be able to rely on Google’s robust security, governance, and reliability controls. This offers them high availability and 99.99% uptime. It also protects their data with encryption by default.

What Are the Disadvantages?

Unfortunately, as with many things, there are some disadvantages to using Google BigQuery. For one, it’s designed to handle massive amounts of data at super-fast speeds. So, for businesses that only have small data sets, BigQuery may not be the right solution.

Another drawback of using the platform is that, although Google BigQuery is reasonably priced and the separation of storage and compute pricing gives businesses better control over pricing, it can add up for businesses who don’t pay proper attention to the tools they use the scale of their operations.

Another disadvantage is that Google BigQuery uses unique SQL implementations designed to smooth the querying of data. As a result, several SQL dialects can be confusing, especially for inexperienced users. Fortunately, it does give businesses the option to revert to standard SQL.

Should Google BigQuery Be Used for Business Intelligence, Reports, and Dashboards?

Now that we’ve seen some advantages and disadvantages of using Google BigQuery, the question is whether they should use it for business intelligence, reporting, and dashboards. The simple answer is yes; combined with the right business intelligence tool, it can be very powerful.

Apart from the reasons mentioned above why businesses should consider using Google BigQuery, like speed and its better pricing structure, it also allows businesses to access the data they need on demand. In this way, businesses ensure that they don’t use data that will lead to outdated results.

Another significant benefit of using Google BigQuery for business intelligence is using AI to evaluate data storage. It then optimizes the data sets into structures that suit the analytics and queries that businesses typically perform better. The inevitable result is that it makes data queries faster over time and reduces costs.

How Can DashboardFox Help with Google BigQuery Based Dashboards and Reports?

Your business needs a BI tool that can help you with Google BigQuery-based dashboards and reports. Our pitch is that DashboardFox could be that tool.

Why is DashboardFox a better choice for this task? Here are some of the reasons why.

Cost

DashboardFox is an affordable one-time pricing model (as opposed to a subscription-based one). Based on the size of your team, DashboardFox fits and grows with small business budgets and needs. Then, it reaches into a fixed price for larger organizations that can save them thousands of dollars worth of fees, compared to other enterprise BI platforms..

Customer Support

With DashboardFox, our relationship does not end when you purchase it for your business. By buying DashboardFox, you also get our support as your virtual assistant for your dashboards and reports needs, especially those related to Google BigQuery. And if you actually want to outsource the effort, so your team can focus on core business, we offer those services as well. Gone are the days when you have to file a ticket if you encounter a problem using your BI tool, then spend hours following up with the customer service, throwing you like a ball to different departments who cannot answer your questions directly.

Our technical experts will be at your beck and call because, for us, you’re our top priority. No need to file for tickets that will just get lost somewhere out there, because we will immediately address your concerns. Alternatively, we can also schedule screen shares for you so that we can check and diagnose what’s really happening and fix them before your very eyes. Lastly, we put your ideas and needs for new features to the very top of our roadmap simply because you are our priority.

Ease of Use

With Google Data Studio, there are a lot of disadvantages, primarily that it requires more of a technical edge to set up and developer reports, and it lacks a lot of the scheduling, exporting, email, and security controls a business needs for team usage. DashboardFox is designed for business users and offers an easier path to providing dashboards and reports.

Contact Us

If you want to see how DashboardFox can help you more with your business, please feel free to contact us for more information. We would be very happy to answer all your questions. Or better yet, why not schedule a live demo with us? That way, you can easily decide if DashboardFox is the one for you. This is not a high-pressure sales pitch, by the way. We’ll let you decide after you try us.

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