Google Cloud Databases

Google has a range of database products including catering for relational databases and NoSQL databases.

https://cloud.google.com/products/databases

Interesting to see that their only option for Oracle is lift and shift but they offer data migration services for mySQL / SQL Server etc. Their primary system for Cloud Data Warehousing is BigQuery.

BigQuery is a serverless highly scalable cloud data warehouse that they claim is cost effective and agile but all the big companies will claim that. Some of the key features of the BiqQuery system are:

Overview:

ML – Enables the building and implementation of machine learning directly on the DB in a fraction of the normal time.

GIS – Native support for Geospatial analysis. This is interesting as many reporting tools do struggle with the integration of geographical data in BI reporting.

BI Engine – Allows for in memory analysis with super-fast query time on large and complex datasets.

Connected Sheets – Allows for the analysis of Billions of rows of data live in Google Sheets with no SQL knowledge. Not sure about this as it is always dangerous to let end users have access to all the data, especially when PID data is on the system so security would be a concern there.

SQL Development:

I was interested to try and find out more about the GUI used and found it quite hard to get more information. It does appear that standard tools like SQL developer can be used but setting up the drivers and the connections strings takes some work.

There is also a standard python library that can be used to connect to the Google DBs via python which could be useful. https://googleapis.dev/python/bigquery/latest/index.html

As I have shown before if you can access the data you can automate any Excel work which inevitable happens even if you try your best to get people to use the BI reporting tool. This leads me nicely onto the BI Tool.

The default Development GUI seems to be their Cloud Console https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/docs/bigquery-web-ui

This very much looks like Googles version of SQL developer with coding windows, table structures etc. available with a click.

BI Tool:

The Enterprise platform for BI is Looker. To quote their website:

“Looker gives you the tools to power a multitude of data experiences, from modern business intelligence and embedded analytics to workflow integrations and custom data apps. Regardless of where your data resides, Looker offers a unified surface to access the truest, most up-to-date version of your company’s data. And with data integrated into users’ daily workflows, organizations can extract value from their data at web scales.”

https://cloud.google.com/looker

Picture belongs to Google and demonstrates the integrated infrastructure and full stack solution they have for data warehousing and BI reporting.

Other Stuff:

When doing this research I found that you can easily connect to public datasets.

https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/public-data

https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/docs/how-to I like the in depth how to guides and think it would make picking up things easier than Oracle for instance where, as a noob, I found the guides very hard to follow.

I tried to find some independent user experiences of BigQuery but was unable to find anything helpful.