Google BigQuery now lets you analyze data from Google Sheets

Google is announcing today that its BigQuery cloud service for running SQL-like queries on data can now easily take in data from the Google Sheets cloud-based spreadsheet software and then save query results inside Google Sheets files.

And changes to spreadsheets won’t cause problems for BigQuery.

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“Time after time, we can make changes within our Google Sheets spreadsheet, and BigQuery will automatically pick up the changes next time you run a query against the spreadsheet!” Google BigQuery technical program manager Tino Tereshko wrote in a blog post.

If you’re a power user of Sheets, you’ll probably appreciate the ability to do more fine-grained research with data in your spreadsheets. It’s a sensible enhancement for Google to make, as it unites BigQuery with more of Google’s own existing services. Previously, Google made it possible to analyze Google Analytics data in BigQuery.

These sorts of integrations could make BigQuery a better choice in the market for cloud-based data warehouses, which is increasingly how Google has positioned BigQuery. Public cloud market leader Amazon Web Services (AWS) has Redshift but no widely used tool for spreadsheets. Microsoft Azure’s SQL Data Warehouse, which has been in preview for several months, does not currently have an official integration with Microsoft Excel, surprising though it may be.

But Google in the past few months has shown signs of caring more about what companies want out of cloud services. In March the company disclosed plans to open data centers in 12 more regions around the world.

In December, Google enhanced BigQuery with custom quotas to limit the amount of money a user spends on any given day.