Got big data? Crunch it with Google’s BigQuery

Google wants to help you crunch big data like cornflakes.

To that end, it is opening up BigQuery, the service is designed for large-scale internal data analytics, to companies of all sizes, and it’s adding a web interface so you can do it all in the cloud.

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Until now, BigQuery has been in a limited preview for a small number of developers. Now, Google is allowing a slew of interested companies into the BigQuery fold.

The service, which is still in a beta of sorts, will be free to users for the time being, and customers will have a 30-day notice before it switches to a pay-to-play model.

Interested parties can sign up now for access to the service.

“Rapidly crunching terabytes of big data can lead to better business decisions, but this has traditionally required tremendous IT investments,” wrote Google product manager Ju-Kay Kwek on the company blog.

“Imagine a large online retailer that wants to provide better product recommendations by analyzing website usage and purchase patterns from millions of website visits. Or consider a car manufacturer that wants to maximize their advertising impact by learning how their last global campaign performed across billions of multimedia impressions.”

Kwek continued to note that while large companies struggle with these types of tasks, they also seem insurmountable (or inefficient, at best) for smaller businesses.

Today, in addition to more users and a web interface, Google BigQuery will also feature a new REST API that will allow developers to run multiple jobs in the background and JOIN statements to run queries across multiple tables. Finally, Google is also allowing users to easily get results onto their desktops or into the cloud via Google Cloud Storage, and then to manage and share those results securely.

Here’s an overview of the product from the Google I/O 2010 demo of BigQuery:

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