Following about six months in beta, Google has released BigQuery, a cloud-based analytics service that it claims can run SQL-like queries on billions of rows of data “at Google speed.” The service is being pitched at enterprises looking to run ad-hoc queries on datasets, and leverages Google’s massively parallel cloud infrastructure to acheive its high performance.
Companies can get started using BigQuery for limited datasets via a self-provisioning interface. Data is uploaded via .csv files and is queried via a web interface or a REST-based web service, using limited SQL queries. Currently, Google allows storage of 100 GB of data at no charge, with monthly storage and query charges beyond that up to maximum datasets of 2 TB – plenty of room for a day of tick data from U.S. equities exchanges.
