Google BigQuery has been updated. The service for analyzing large amounts of data now can handle larger result sets, and has functions for advanced analytics, and caching of large query results. At the same time lower prices have been announced.

Writing on the Official Google Enterprise Blog, Ju-kay Kwek, BigQuery Product Manager says:

“Today we’re announcing another update to BigQuery packed with new capabilities.

Large results: run queries that return arbitrarily large numbers of rows and save them as a new table for follow-up analysis.

Window functions: take advantage of built-in functions like Rank and Partition to create sophisticated statistical analyses with far simpler SQL than before.

Query caching: now recent queries that are re-run return a cached result when the underlying table is unchanged, providing more cost-effective analysis.”

Until the changes, output from queries was limited to 128MB of compressed data per query. The ability to save the output as tables removes that restriction. The new facility is used simply by enabling a new --allow_large_results flag when issuing a query job, then specifying a destination table.

The new functions extend the existing support for standard functions such as quantiles, variance and standard deviation with analytical functions for ranking, percentiles, and relative row navigation. You can see examples of using the new functions on the Google Developers blog.

Query caching has also been added so that BigQuery now remembers values that you've previously computed, saving you time and the cost of recalculating the query. Query results are kept cached for 24 hours, on a best effort basis, though you can disable query caching. The UI has also been improved with features to show any problems with your query syntax, along with an estimate of how much the query would cost to run. You can also now abandon a running query to start a different one.

New pricing options, coming into effect on July 1st are intended to make BigQuery more affordable. The on-demand rate for interactive queries is being reduced from $0.12/GB/month to $0.08/GB/month and customers with higher-volume usage will in future be able to opt in for tiered query pricing.

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