The amount of data generated and collected in an enterprise scales from trickle to torrent in no time. The way companies are using data and deriving value from it has changed dramatically in the last decade. Data is now used not only to report the past but also to predict the future. With all the big data initiatives going on in companies, data has now taken center stage once again. Most of these big data initiatives are not tactical but strategic and sponsored by the executive teams.

Traditional on-premise hosted data warehouse solutions are now becoming hard to scale due to various reasons such as regular hardware upgrades. Since the data captured and stored is growing exponentially in most enterprises, licensing costs are increasing with upgrades and operations, which are sucking in considerable money.

For companies, large or small, that are looking for affordable data warehouse solutions to host their data for analysis and reporting, Google BigQuery may fit the bill and the skill.

In this chapter we will:

• Get started with the Google Cloud Platform
• Briefly overview various services in Google Cloud Platform that can help you get data in and out of Google BigQuery
• Get started with Google BigQuery and evaluate its performance, capabilities, and features using the public dataset provided by Google Cloud