BigQuery Gets 'Big JOIN' and More New Features
Google recently announced some major new features for its BigQuery analytics tool, including SQL-esque join and aggregate functionality, native TIMESTAMP support, and an expanded web UI. The "Big JOIN" feature is probably the headline addition here, coming in response to developer demand. According to Google:
Our new Big JOIN feature gives users the ability to produce a result set by merging data from two large tables by a common key. Big JOIN simplifies data analysis that would otherwise require a data transformation step, by allowing users to specify JOIN operations using SQL.
Popular web applications produce user activity logs that can grow by billions of rows each week. Dividing users into smaller groups is a key step for analysis. However, each group of users can number in the millions. To handle this for such large volumes, we've enabled Big Group Aggregations, which significantly increases the number of distinct values that can be grouped in a result set.
To use these new features, simply add the EACH modifier to JOIN or GROUP BY clauses.
You can find out more at the Google Developers blog.
