Cloud BigQuery

Google Cloud BigQuery is a fully managed, serverless, highly scalable enterprise data warehouse that enables super-fast SQL queries using the processing power of Google infrastructure. It allows you to analyze massive datasets in seconds without managing any infrastructure.

Key Features:

1. Serverless - No cluster management; just run queries and pay per query.

2. Petabyte scale - Analyze petabytes of data in seconds using distributed computing.

3. Standard SQL - Supports ANSI SQL with extensions for nested and repeated fields.

4. Built-in ML - BigQuery ML allows building and running ML models directly using SQL.

5. Streaming ingestion - Stream data in real-time for up-to-date analysis.

The below example shows how to run a BigQuery query using the gcloud CLI and Python client.

It gives the following output,

Top 10 words in Shakespeare:
  the             27801
  I               21028
  and             19649
  to              17361
  of              16750
  a               14593
  you             12490
  my              12469
  in              10906
  is              9628

BigQuery Pricing:

On-demand - $5 per TB of data processed. First 1 TB per month is free.

Flat-rate - Fixed monthly cost for dedicated query processing capacity (slots).

Storage - Active storage $0.02/GB/month; long-term storage $0.01/GB/month.