First announced in 2010 and made available to developers in 2012, Google’s BigQuery is a supercomputer that lets you derive meaningful analytics in SQL, allowing you to only pay for what you use. The company announced via a blog post today that the data analytics service is getting several new feature enhancements and improvements including improvements to the streaming API, a performance diagnostic tool and a new way to capture detailed usage logs.
The biggest of the new features is the Custom Quotas. BigQuery will now allow administrators to set daily quotas for individuals or entire projects so that you do not cross a given limit. The blog post announcing the feature reads:
Custom quotas allow you to set daily quotas that will help prevent runaway query costs. There are two ways you can set the quota:
- Project wide: an entire BigQuery project cannot exceed the daily custom quota.
- Per user: each individual user within a BigQuery project is subject to the daily custom quota.
You will also get major improvements in the Streaming API. New features and enhancements include availability in EU locations, Template Tables, which is a feature that allows an existing table to serve as a template for a streaming insert request and the removal of the initial ‘warm-up’ delay.
Query Explain is also something most people will find useful. It shows you the skeleton of the SQL queries you put up and gives you a step-by-step analysis of them. It will be very useful to optimize queries, troubleshoot errors or understand if BigQuery Slots might benefit you.
Lastly, you will now also get the ability to audit logs. These will help you record every single detail about your project. The feature, however, is currently in Beta.
