Google on Thursday announced a slew of new features for Google BigQuery, its service for quickly analyzing large amounts of data, to let analytic teams deliver what organizations really need: “actionable and data-driven business insights.” In short, Google has added new capabilities to help businesses work effectively with large amounts of data over a greater range of query and data types. Here are the three new features Google wants to highlight: Big JOIN: use SQL-like queries to join very large datasets at interactive speeds. Big Group Aggregations: perform groupings on large numbers of distinct values. Timestamp: native support for importing and querying Timestamp data. The new Big JOIN feature gives users the ability to produce a result set by merging data from two large tables by a common key: you can skip a data transformation step by simply specifying JOIN operations using SQL. Big Group Aggregations meanwhile significantly increase the number of distinct values that can be grouped in a result set. To use these two new features, all you have to do is add the EACH modifier to JOIN or GROUP BY clauses. The new TIMESTAMP data type lets you import date and time values in formats familiar to users of databases such as MySQL, while still preserving timezone offset information. There are also new functions for converting these fields into other formats, calculating intervals, and extracting components such as the hour, day of week, and quarter. Google has also
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