Google's BigQuery Cloud Adds Support for JSON, Some NoSQL Data Formats

Google BigQuery, the company's data analysis cloud, is getting a relatively important update with the biggest news being that it now supports JSON data objects. JSON is widely used on the web so it should be right at home with BigQuery.

"JSON is the data format of the web. JSON is used to power most modern websites, is a native format for many NoSQL databases hosting top web applications, and provides the primary data format in many REST APIs," Google's Ryan Boyd wrote.

"Google BigQuery, our cloud service for ad-hoc analytics on big data, has now added support for JSON and the nested/repeated structure inherent in the data format," he added.

The nested and repeated fields are used by other data structures, so the feature should be useful for more than JSON and it should come in handy for many types of NoSQL databases, including Google's own App Engine Datastore cloud service.

Other improvements include a new limit of 1,000 jobs per table per day, up from 1,000 jobs per day in total and a file size limit increase to 100 GB from 4 GB.