Book Image

Learning Google BigQuery

By : Thirukkumaran Haridass, Mikhail Berlyant, Eric Brown
Book Image

Learning Google BigQuery

By: Thirukkumaran Haridass, Mikhail Berlyant, Eric Brown

Overview of this book

Google BigQuery is a popular cloud data warehouse for large-scale data analytics. This book will serve as a comprehensive guide to mastering BigQuery, and how you can utilize it to quickly and efficiently get useful insights from your Big Data. You will begin with getting a quick overview of the Google Cloud Platform and the various services it supports. Then, you will be introduced to the Google BigQuery API and how it fits within in the framework of GCP. The book covers useful techniques to migrate your existing data from your enterprise to Google BigQuery, as well as readying and optimizing it for analysis. You will perform basic as well as advanced data querying using BigQuery, and connect the results to various third party tools for reporting and visualization purposes such as R and Tableau. If you're looking to implement real-time reporting of your streaming data running in your enterprise, this book will also help you. This book also provides tips, best practices and mistakes to avoid while working with Google BigQuery and services that interact with it. By the time you're done with it, you will have set a solid foundation in working with BigQuery to solve even the trickiest of data problems.
Table of Contents (9 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Google Cloud and Google BigQuery

Mastering transformation with User-Defined Functions

All of the functions listed so far in this chapter are built-in functions in BigQuery. They are fully supported by Google and were created to handle the common tasks most analysts have to deal with. With that said, from time to time, situations will arise where these common functions will not suffice. Usually, the analyst will need to create a very intricate query to deal with these situations. For this, Google has created UDFs (user-defined functions). UDFs allow users to temporarily create their own functions using the standard functions included in BigQuery. These functions can then be called throughout the rest of the query using only the name of the function as well as the input.

Some considerations when using UDFs

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