BigQuery –  Google’s server-less, highly scalable enterprise data warehouse, is designed to make data analysts more productive with unmatched price-performance. Basically BigQuery is an online database. The benefit of having an online database is that you don’t have to have your own in-house server box and network and server administrator for managing your box. You have access to your data from anywhere and anytime.

A clear benefit when using Google BigQuery compared with Google Analytics is that with BQ you can get raw upsampled data from Google which you normally don’t as Google aggregates large data sets. Also get it immediately compared waiting for hits to be appearing in GA (in some case up to 24h) thus allowing you to dig deeper in to customer specific analysis at any given time.

The pricing is perfect for us, as we don’t have a huge amounts of data, then it is free. Otherwise 1 GB of storage costs 2 cents. But every month you get the first 10GB free. We aren’t even close to that kind of amount.

Main Business Intelligence (BI) tools have a connection available for BigQuery. You can have easy access to your data using SQL queries in BI tools.  Then the data can be analysed and visualised with BI tools, such as PowerBi, Qlik or Google Data Studio. 

BigQuery is a very good alternative to SQL server for storing data. Service is cost friendly and the only thing you need to get started is a Google account.