Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 13
Using BigQuery from Third-Party Tools
BigQuery was designed to be a platform for Big Data analytics that you could
layer other tools on top of, rather than an all-in-one Big Data solution. A
number of third parties have built tools on top of BigQuery to extend its
capabilities. Some of these tools enable you to make BigQuery work just
like your on-premise relational database, visualize your data in the cloud, or
access your data from scientific applications. This chapter walks you through
several of these types of tools; the goal is to show a little bit of what they can
do and how they integrate with BigQuery.
There are three parts to this chapter:
•
BigQuery adapters
: If you currently use ODBC or JDBC to connect to
your database, you can use BigQuery without writing any code just by
using the Simba ODBC driver. This section also discusses client-side
encryption.
•
Scientific data processing
: R is the de facto standard for scientific
data analysis. See how to use the
bigrquery
R package to connect to
BigQuery from R. Also see BigQuery in the Python Data Analysis Library
(aka pandas).
•
Data visualization
: See how to visualize your BigQuery data using two
popular commercial applications: Tableau and BIME.
These are only a representative sampling of the third-party tools that
integrate with BigQuery. Google keeps track of a number of them at
third-party-tools
. There is also a handy BigQuery subreddit
collection of applications of BigQuery. Before starting on a new project, it
might be helpful to check these locations to see if someone has already done a
lot of the hard work for you!
