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BigQuery
BigLake
BigLake is a new service that is highly connected with BigQuery. It is the upcoming Data Lake solution from Google:
- Query data lakes and warehouses from different providers
- The data access permissions are on a fine-granular level
- All common open data formats are supported: Parquet, Avro, ORC, CSV, JSON
To get further information and find Get Started guides, you can take a look here.
Analytics Hub
It is a completely new service from Google and like BigLake highly connected with BigQuery. It would be worth an own blog post, but I want to give an overview of the tool.
Analytics Hub is about sharing data in many ways. The service differentiates between publishers and subscribers of data. Publishers can define a set of tables or views as shared datasets and the subscribers get a read-only link to the data. The publisher of the data gets also usage metrics about the shared data.
In the Frontend it has its own tab.
Then you can create an exchange or search inside the “Marketplace”.
The menu looks like the shared dataset one. You can search for interesting datasets there and do a subscription.
Last possible steps for Rows per page
The available public shared datasets
For further information, you can take a look here.
New Search function
Google published a new function you can use in BigQuery. The SEARCH function needs two input parameters, the string you want to investigate and the search term. This function has some specialties in relation to the REGEXP_CONTAINS function.
Inside the official documentation from BigQuery is a good overview about the features (I just show the most interesting one):
SEARCH('foo-bar', 'foo bar') -> true ('-' and ' ' are breakers)
SEARCH('foo-bar', 'foobar') -> false (The search_query is not split)
SEARCH('foo-bar', 'foo\&bar') -> true (double backslash escapes the & (& = breaker)
SEARCH('foo-bar', 'bar foo') -> true (The order of terms doesn't matter)
SEARCH('foo-bar', 'Foo Bar') -> true (Tokens are made lower-case)
SEARCH(['foo', 'bar'], 'foo bar') -> false (No single array entry matches all search terms)
Especially the breaker functionality is an interesting one.
New Metadata Information Schemas
BigQuery got 3 new Information Schemas for some kind of metadata:
- TABLE_STORAGE: Snapshot of current storage usage for tables and materialized views
- TABLE_STORAGE_TIMELINE_BY_PROJECT: get table storage changes over time at the project level
- TABLE_STORAGE_TIMELINE_BY_ORGANIZATION: get table storage changes over time at the organization level
Data Studio
Full support for some connectors
The following connectors are upgrading from their beta status and are now fully supported:
- Amazon Redshift
- Microsoft SQL Server 2017
- MySQL
- PostgreSQL
New data from Google Ads
The Google Ads Connectors are delivering new data from now on. For already connected data sources with GAds data, you have to refresh the fields.
Some new field examples are:
- Average basket size
- average order value
- Brand
- Product Title
- Product Type L1
- Avg. Product Price
- Country of sale
- …
Google Analytics
Autosuggest in GA4
Google improved the search for your GA4 insights. When you start to type in a search term, you get some suggestions with Autosuggest. With the arrow keys and pressing the enter button, you can choose one of the suggestions.
Set Conversion Events
Every event in GA4 can be set as a conversion. Conversion Events are shown in other (more detailed) reports. Google made it a bit easier to mark an event as conversion.
Before the change, you had to go to the configuration area to set an event as conversion.
Now you can also go into Reports > Engagement > Events and mark the events as Conversion.
Google Tag Manager
Collecting data
It’s difficult to give a rating to this update, without detailed information. So for this point I’ll just list some of the main elements:
- For server-side tracking, they may now collect aggregate information
- They may use this data to improve, maintain, protect, and develop the service
- They will not share this data with any other Google product without your consent
