Database Reference
In-Depth Information
all of the data is considered sensitive, so it must be sent encrypted. In the
past, people cited performance reasons for avoiding HTTPS. Now, most
people believe that the security gained (prevention against
man-in-the-middle attacks, authentication of both client and server, and so
on) is worth the 1 or 2 percent performance hit.
Host
if not all, Google APIs use the same domain. They are not hosted at
and there was a cross-site-scripting (XSS) vulnerability in some Google web
product (Picasa, for example), then an attacker could gain access to your
data in BigQuery, or any other Google API. Although XSS vulnerabilities
in Google sites are rare, it is safer to remove them as a possible risk. By
hosting APIs on a domain that does not have any web properties,
www.googleapis.com
should be immune from XSS attacks.
API Selector
The API selector is how the Google API front-end servers can route your
calls to the right API. There are two parts of the API selector: name and
version. For BigQuery, the API name is, somewhat obviously,
bigquery
.
The BigQuery beta version introduced at Google IO in 2010 was version
v1
, but ever since it was launched publicly, the version has been
v2
. In
the future, the active version number may change if breaking changes are
introduced.
The BigQuery team's philosophy on changes tends to be that API additions
can be made without a version number revision. For example, the ability to
run queries in dry run mode was added via an additional flag passed into
the query. Because there was no breaking change—it would only affect users
who explicitly used the flag—there was no need to change the version. Other
Google APIs have different criteria for increasing the version number.
One thing to note about the API version is that when it does change, the old
version is usually left running for a significant period of time—usually six
months to a year. Users of the old version may not use new features, but they
should continue to use the old feature sets without problems. This is why
the version number is included in the path, rather than just using something
