BigQuery is a powerful, enterprise-grade, and highly-scalable web service from Google that is designed for handling and analyzing big data. It is a cloud-based, fully-managed, NoOps, and highly scalable data warehouse that lets businesses conduct real-time analytics on their Internet-scale data.
Specifically, BigQuery is a product within Google Cloud Platform that allows users to work with large datasets through SQL-like queries. With BigQuery, businesses can quickly analyze vast amounts of data in real-time and gain meaningful insights to make data-driven decisions.
Companies are seeking professionals proficient with BigQuery, as these individuals can harness the power of its features to make crucial business decisions. As an employee, having BigQuery as a skill can help you stand out from other candidates, since it demonstrates your ability to handle, analyze, and interpret big data efficiently.
While using BigQuery doesn't require in-depth programming knowledge, there are several related skills that can assist in mastering it.
1. SQL: BigQuery uses SQL-like commands, hence a solid understanding of SQL is crucial.
2. Experience with cloud platforms: Since BigQuery is a Google Cloud product, familiarity with working on Google Cloud or other cloud platforms is beneficial.
3. Understanding of data warehousing and big data concepts: Knowledge of data modeling, ETL, and data pipeline work can be helpful.
4. Familiarity with data analytics and visualization tools: Experience with tools like Tableau, QlikView, or Google Data Studio can complement BigQuery performance since these tools often use BigQuery as a data source.
Mastering BigQuery can open new career opportunities as data analyst, data engineer, business intelligence specialist, data scientist, and several other data-centric roles. Candidates aiming to learn BigQuery would find it advantageous if they already have a foundation in the above-mentioned related skills.
