Introduction to Google Cloud BigQuery and Looker Studio - Google Cloud Platform Tutorial

- [Instructor] In this chapter, we are going to learn the basics of how to visualize BigQuery data in Looker Studio. We're going to start with a real-world challenge and tell a story with data using Google Cloud, BigQuery and Looker Studio. Suppose you are a news reporter or a data journalist, if you like, and you have been asked to write an article about the change in the global temperature in the past 100 years. So you decide to do a little bit research yourself. Now, where do you find the data to support the research, and how do you analyze them and find the insights? And finally, how will you visualize your findings so you can present them to your readers? This is a challenge we are going to solve in this chapter. First, I'm going to spend a couple minutes with you to introduce the tools we're using throughout this course. In this course, we are going to use BigQuery for data analysis and the Looker Studio for visualization. BigQuery is a cloud-native data warehouse solution offered by Google Cloud. It is a fully managed solution that allows you to query even gigabytes of data in a matter of seconds. And because it's fully managed, you don't need to take care of the technical infrastructure behind it and you don't need to worry about how the service is hosted. Once the data is in BigQuery, all you need to do is to get insights from the data and you can analyze the data using SQL language, just as you do with many other database services. SQL stands for Structured Query Language. It is probably the most popular language widely used by most relational databases. If you are not familiar with it yet, don't worry. Most of the examples we use in this course should be easy enough to follow. But if you do want to know a little bit more about SQL specifically, you can check out some other courses on the LinkedIn Learning platform, and I will provide links in the course material. Looker Studio is a free self-service business intelligence platform that lets users visualize the data. So once we've got our insights in BigQuery, we can connect the data with Looker Studio and plot them in different types of visualizations, such as bar charts, line charts, heat maps, or even geo charts. Together, BigQuery and Looker Studio form a powerful combination of tools for big data analytics. You can use them in a wide range of business settings. They're used by both business and technical professionals. And in the rest of this chapter, we are going to use BigQuery and the Looker Studio to analyze the change in global temperature in the past 100 years. You'll see just how intuitive it is.