A new beta of BigQuery, Google Cloud Platform’s data warehousing and analysis service, lets database administrators use standard SQL rather than a dialect of the relational database query language, Google said today in a blog post.
Version 1.11 of BigQuery offers the ability to write optimized queries and sub-queries in any clause of a SQL statement, such as those using SELECT, FROM and WHERE, it said. Permissible datatypes now include dates, times, arrays and structs, and more support has been added for timestamps. BigQuery now supports theta JOINs, which use inequalities in key comparisons.
But Google recommended that BigQuery users continue writing in legacy SQL until the beta moves to general release.
In other changes, Google said BigQuery now supports Cloud IAM, an identify and access-management system — though again, only in a beta version. This new feature lets database administrators fine-tune who can do what with data, creating roles such as viewer, editor, user or owner.
Another new feature is support for time-based partitioning, which Google said eliminates the need to manually partition database tables before running a query. Queries now can span multiple days, months or years, and only data pertinent to the times specified will be processed, not the entire table.
