14 DAY TRIAL // For a company so invested in the cloud and with probably the most powerful computing infrastructure in the world, Google hasn't really made an impression in the public cloud space. But it's still trying to change that, for example, with the latest addition the public launch of its BigQuery service.
As the name implies, BigQuery is designed to get through huge sets of data fast and should come in handy for any company that wants to analyze large amounts of information.
"Rapidly crunching terabytes of big data can lead to better business decisions, but this has traditionally required tremendous IT investments," Ju-kay Kwek, product manager at Google, wrote.
Large companies have plenty of use cases for big data. The ones that depend on this type of analysis have traditionally invested in developing an internal computing infrastructure. Smaller companies have not had this option though.
"We developed Google BigQuery Service for large-scale internal data analytics. At Google I/O last year, we opened a preview of the service to a limited number of enterprises and developers," Kwek wrote.
"Today we're releasing some big improvements, and putting one of Google's most powerful data analysis systems into the hands of more companies of all sizes," he said.
With the advent of the cloud, huge computing power is now available to everyone. And BigQuery, for the time being, is completely free to use, although it's still in a beta of sorts. Google will announce any changes to the prices 30 days in advance.
The service has also gotten some improvements ahead of the broader launch. There is now a graphical UI to browser and analyze the data.
There is also a new REST API to access the service programmatically. This also has the benefit of enabling users to run multiple jobs at a time. BigQuery is still not available to everyone, but businesses that are interested can sign up and be contacted by Google to be a part of the beta test.