Google(s goog) sits on masses of traffic and advertising data, and has decided that it should take advantage of its expertise in building the infrastructure to handle those petabytes of information to offer a data analytics service in its cloud. Google’s BigQuery product, which debuted at our Structure Data conference in March, lets companies upload their information to Google and then perform business analytics in the cloud.
On Tuesday, the service launches to the general public providing up to 2 terabytes for storage at 12 cents for gigabyte and processing on up to 1000 queries per day or 20 terabytes of data at 3.5 cents per gigabyte. This is a boon for companies that might have large analytics needs, but doesn’t have a desire to invest in a data center or specialized equipment to process those queries.
The Google site and blog post detailing the service has more information, but the gist is, companies upload their data to Google (or maybe it’s already there) and then they have the ability to run MySQL-based queries against many terabytes of data. Customers can also combine data across different databases using JOIN queries. Companies can use it in-house for their own analytics, or they can build services on top of the product as French company, We Are Cloud, has done.
The trend of hosted data in a cloud environment is growing in popularity with companies like 1010data as has the lure of making ad hoc, unplanned queries across a huge set of information. Check out Facebook’s tool to perform such queries on its own infrastructure. For more, check out my chat with Ju-Kay Kwek, product manager at Google discussing BigQuery and how to keep data analytics products in the cloud from becoming a way to lock businesses into a single provider:
