Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 8
Putting It Together
The first one-half of the topic describes the mechanics of how you interact
with BigQuery at different layers of the programming stack; covering the low
level HTTP transport all the way up to the command-line and web client. The
following chapters cover more advanced uses of BigQuery by exploring the
query language and how to assemble basic operations into useful solutions.
This chapter in the middle of the topic is a bit of a diversion. It covers the
construction of a toy application involving Android, App Engine, and a few
JavaScript frameworks—all of which are quite independent of BigQuery. The
point of building an application involving these pieces and BigQuery is to
concretely demonstrate how the service can be leveraged in a real application.
One important caveat is that the application code is not actually production
code. Production code with all the requirements of testability and
comprehensive error handling tends to obscure the core functionality. The
code samples that accompany this chapter provide a complete application
while allowing you to quickly see how the various pieces fit together. Even
the discussion in the chapter focuses on the parts where the different
components integrate with each other because those tend to be the most
interesting. Also, no attempt has been made to strictly adhere to the best
practices of any of the platforms other than BigQuery. After all, this is a
book about BigQuery, and a number of excellent topics and online resources
for working with Android and App Engine are available. To summarize, this
chapter can be a source of ideas for how you can incorporate BigQuery into
your applications to enable easy data analyses rather than source code to be
incorporated directly. Portions of the code are also called out that can be
made more robust as a useful exercise.
This chapter appears in the middle of the topic rather than at the end because
it presents concrete use cases for the solutions described in the following
chapters that cover advanced BigQuery features. If you are not interested in
the details of the application, you may want to at least read the first section
explaining its functionality because it provides some context for the material
in later chapters.
