BigQuery Support For Unstructured Data, Apache Spark and Datastream

Google Cloud is taking big steps to provide the most open and powerful data cloud in the market to ensure customers can utilize all their data, from all sources, across all cloud providers and platforms.

At Google Cloud Next, the company launched the support for unstructured data in BigQuery to expand the ability of people to work with all types of data.

“Beginning now, data teams can analyze structured and unstructured data in BigQuery, with easy access to Google Cloud’s capabilities in machine learning, speech recognition, computer vision, translation, and text processing, using BigQuery’s familiar SQL interface,” said Gerrit Kazmaier, vice president and general manager of Data Analytics at Google Cloud in a blog post.

Google Cloud is also unifying BigQuery and its operational databases. Datastream for BigQuery helps customers replicate data from AlloyDB, PostgreSQL, MySQL, and Oracle directly into BigQuery to make sure applications have the latest information.

Lastly, the company announced at Google Cloud Next a BigQuery preview of an integrated experience for Apache Spark, which is a top open-source analytics engine for large data processing.

The move will enable data practitioners to create BigQuery stored procedures using Spark that integrate with their SQL pipelines.