Database Reference
In-Depth Information
BigQuery Adapters
There are two ways to try to incorporate BigQuery into your production
processes: You can either adapt your code to talk to BigQuery or you can
adapt BigQuery to talk to your code. If the latter route sounds silly, it needn't
be; some third-party tools adapt BigQuery to make it look like a standard
relational database.
For instance, if your code uses “standard” Open Database Connectivity
(ODBC) connections, you can use a freely available ODBC driver to start
performing BigQuery queries without having to change your code. The
Simba ODBC driver translates Standard SQL into BigQuery SQL and allows
BigQuery to be used virtually anywhere an ODBC-compatible database can
be used. Alternately, if you use Java to talk to your database, you can use
the StarSchema Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) connector to allow you
to talk directly to BigQuery. Both of these mechanisms have limitations,
however, which are discussed later in this section.
There is another type of connector discussed in this section: the Encrypted
BigQuery (
ebq
) connector, which adapts BigQuery to look like BigQuery,
but with a twist: It encrypts all the data locally so that the server never
sees the unencrypted data. The
ebq
connector performs a number of
mathematical tricks to allow you to access your data normally and do most
of the same types of queries you do on your unencrypted data.
Simba ODBC Connector
ODBC is one of the oldest ways to talk to a database; it is a well-understood
standard that is used by a wide range of software and has connectors for
a wide range of databases. Simba is a Canadian company that specializes
in writing ODBC drivers. It has been around for almost as long as ODBC
has and has built ODBC drivers for virtually anything that you can think
of—from SAP to MongoDB to Hive. One of its most recent ODBC drivers
provides access to BigQuery.
The Simba driver has two modes of operation. The first, native mode, allows
you to run queries directly in BigQuery SQL. That is, you write the same
queries that you'd write if you were using the BigQuery web UI, and the
Simba driver passes them to BigQuery. The other, translated mode,
translates standard SQL queries into BigQuery SQL. So if you already have
