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Google opens BigQuery for cloud analytics

Dangles free trial to lure doubters

Google Atmosphere Google is taking its BigQuery cloud data analytics engine to market, after a limited beta over the past year.

The BigQuery service lets users upload and crunch huge amounts of data without investing in their own data center resources. Delegates at the Google Atmosphere conference in Mountain View, California, on Monday were told that the BigQuery engine can quickly scan through up to 70TB of uncompressed data and spit out analytic results.

“This is one of those things you would have to have spent incredible amounts of money to get in the past,” said Dave Girouard, Google’s vice president of applications. “That’s one of the benefits of cloud – an infrastructure that would have cost you $5m a few years ago can now be had for less than half a million.”

The new service comes with a new REST API, which lets programmers build the service into existing code and use it to run multiple jobs and manage permissions on the fly. Data tables can be stored and used from within Google’s cloud storage offering. There’s also a new interface, designed to display results with a minimum of clutter.

BigQuery debuted at the Google I/O conference last year, and a limited beta with a few chosen partners has got the search giant to the point where it’s ready to try large-scale deployment. The service is free at the moment, and users will get a 30-day warning before bills start to come in. ®

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