Hello BigQuery

Google BigQuery is a fast, economical, and fully managed data warehouse for large-scale data analytics. You can use BigQuery and SQL to focus on transforming and gaining insights into your data. Datalab supports the Standard SQL BigQuery.

This query works against the Wikipedia sample dataset within BigQuery. Run the next two cells to define and execute the query to see top 10 wikipedia articles, based on the length in number of characters.


In [3]:
%%bq query
SELECT id, title, num_characters
FROM `publicdata.samples.wikipedia`
WHERE wp_namespace = 0
ORDER BY num_characters DESC
LIMIT 10


Out[3]:
idtitlenum_characters
10396793The Holocaust10245346
692772Jack (film)8717313
19167679Virus8683245
19167679Virus8683245
1178134Black Codes (United States)8593028
18404036Nazism8448488
5843419France8235227
646136Elisa Carrió8234289
5122699John Kerry8153728
22171Nuclear winter8055429

(rows: 10, time: 0.2s, cached, job: job_aBikdrd-wfYpb4wZHWPxDJF5g_o)

If you're a BigQuery user, you've likely used the BigQuery console to issue queries and display results. Datalab also makes it simple to issue a SQL query and see the results.

As the these sample and tutorial notebooks illustrate, Datalab goes further, allowing you to issue multiple queries, visualize the data beyond tables, and ultimately build sophisticated pipelines to use your data productively, to the fullest extent.

One additional link - the BigQuery SQL reference. This reference is also accessible at any time from the Help menu on the toolbar on the top of the page.