What it is
BigQuery is Google Cloud's data warehouse: store huge tables and query them with SQL without provisioning servers or clusters. It charges for the data each query processes, with 1 TiB free per month, and connects natively to Google Analytics 4, Google Sheets and Firebase. It also includes machine learning in SQL and AI functions powered by Gemini.
How to use it
- Export Google Analytics 4 events and analyze them in SQL with no sampling.
- Query millions of rows from Google Sheets with Connected Sheets.
- Train models in SQL with BigQuery ML, without moving data.
- Ask in plain language and let Gemini help you write queries.
- Try it free in the sandbox, no credit card required.
What it's good for
- An online store joining GA4 events with sales to see which campaigns convert.
- A marketing team building Looker Studio or Google Sheets reports on data from several sources.
- A mobile app built on Firebase exporting analytics and crash data for deeper analysis.
Pros
- Serverless: no clusters to size or shut down
- 1 TiB of queries and 10 GiB of storage free every month
- Native export from Google Analytics 4 and Firebase
- Google Cloud console available in Spanish
Cons
- A careless query on big tables can get expensive, so set quotas
- Ties you to the Google Cloud ecosystem
- Setting up projects and permissions in Google Cloud has a learning curve
