All news with #bigquery tag

Oklahoma Transforms Data Access, Strengthens Employer Trust

🔍 The Oklahoma Employment Security Commission modernized its 40‑year mainframe data architecture with a cloud-first data platform built on BigQuery and analytics delivered via Looker. Partnering with Google Public Sector and Phase2, OESC reorganized opaque, mainframe-mimicking schemas into a performant, intuitive model and enabled point-in-time snapshots previously impossible. Critical reporting moved from months to hours, stakeholders gained self-service access, and the agency unlocked employer insights that supported tax analysis, improved auditability, and accelerated fraud detection.

BigQuery Studio updated with streamlined console UI

🔧 BigQuery Studio unveils a simplified, organized console interface designed to help data analysts, engineers, and scientists work more efficiently. The update introduces an expanded Explorer view for easier resource discovery, a context-aware Reference panel that surfaces table schemas and lets you insert query snippets, and a decluttered layout including a dedicated Job history tab. These changes reduce context switching and tab proliferation so users can focus on analysis.

Google Cloud Adds AI Annotations and Object Contexts

🧠 Google Cloud is introducing two Cloud Storage features—auto annotate and object contexts—that apply pretrained AI to generate metadata and attach custom key-value tags to stored objects. Auto annotate (experimental) produces image annotations such as object detection, labels, and objectionable-content signals tied to an object's lifecycle. Object contexts (preview) let teams add, manage, and query contextual tags with IAM controls and Storage Insights integration. Together they enable scalable discovery, curation, and governance of previously unanalyzed unstructured “dark data.”

BigQuery Data Clean Room Query Templates — Preview

🔒 BigQuery data clean room query templates are now available in preview, enabling clean room owners to publish fixed, reusable TVF-based queries that accept table or field inputs and return only aggregated rows. Templates reduce data exfiltration risk, simplify onboarding for non-SQL users, and enforce consistent analytical and privacy controls via aggregation thresholds and approval workflows. They support single-direction and multi-party collaboration while keeping query logic hidden from subscribers.

AI Forecasting and Conversational Analytics in BigQuery

🔎 Google added two BigQuery tools—ask_data_insights and BigQuery Forecast—to the MCP Toolbox and the Agent Development Kit (ADK) to enable conversational analytics and time-series predictions for agents. ask_data_insights uses the Conversational Analytics API to interpret plain-English questions, generate and run queries, and return summarised answers with a step‑by‑step log for transparency. BigQuery Forecast leverages BigQuery ML’s TimesFM model via AI.FORECAST so agents can run forecasting jobs directly inside BigQuery without separate ML infrastructure.

Google Cloud Customers: Monthly Innovations Roundup

🚀 This roundup highlights how leading organizations are using Google Cloud to optimize networks, accelerate AI, and scale mission-critical services. From Uber reducing edge latency with Hybrid NEGs to Target rebuilding search with AlloyDB AI hybrid search, customers report measurable gains in performance, cost, and reliability. Healthcare, finance, media, and telecommunications teams also describe operational wins — faster inference, seamless migrations, and stronger real-time experiences.

Gemini CLI Extensions Enable Google Data Cloud Access

🔧 Google released open-source Gemini CLI extensions that integrate Gemini with Google Data Cloud services, enabling terminal-based access to BigQuery, Cloud SQL, and AlloyDB. Developers install the CLI (recommended v0.6.0), add extensions, and configure IAM and environment variables to connect to projects. Extensions support provisioning databases and users, natural-language querying, AI forecasting, and conversational analytics, though some require enabling additional APIs.

Enabling Data Scientists to Become Agentic Architects

🧭 Google outlines an AI-native stack to transform data scientists into agentic architects, unifying development, real-time data access, and production-grade agent deployment. Enhancements to Colab Enterprise notebooks add native SQL cells, editable visualizations, and an interactive Data Science Agent that can orchestrate BigQuery ML, DataFrames, and Spark workflows. The Lightning Engine is now generally available to accelerate Spark, while previews for stateful BigQuery continuous queries and autonomous embedding generation bring real-time streaming and vector search into analytics. A 'Build-Deploy-Connect' toolkit, including the Agent Development Kit, MCP Toolbox, and Gemini CLI extensions, helps move notebook prototypes into secure, scalable agent fleets.

Seattle Children’s Uses AI to Accelerate Pediatric Care

🤖 Seattle Children’s partnered with Google Cloud to build Pathway Assistant, a multimodal AI chatbot that turns thousands of pediatric clinical pathway PDFs into conversational, searchable guidance. Using Vertex AI and Gemini, the assistant extracts JSON metadata, parses diagrams and flowcharts, and returns cited answers in seconds. The tool logs clinician feedback to BigQuery and stores source documents in Cloud Storage, enabling continuous improvement of documentation and metadata.

Google Cloud's Differentiated AI Stack Fuels Startups

🚀 Google Cloud highlights how its differentiated AI tech stack is accelerating startup innovation worldwide, with nine of the top ten AI labs, most AI unicorns, and more than 60% of generative AI startups using its platform. Startups are leveraging Vertex AI, TPUs, multimodal models like Veo 3 and Gemini, plus services such as AI Studio and GKE to build agents, generative media, medical tools, and developer platforms. Programs like the Google for Startups Cloud Program provide credits, mentorship, and engineering support to help founders scale.

BigQuery scalability and reliability upgrades for Gen AI

🚀 Google Cloud announced BigQuery performance and usability enhancements to accelerate generative AI inference. Improvements include >100x throughput for first-party text generation and >30x for embeddings, plus support for Vertex AI Provisioned Throughput and dynamic token batching to pack many rows per request. New reliability features—partial-failure mode, adaptive traffic control, and robust retries—prevent individual row failures from failing whole queries and simplify large-scale LLM workflows.

Gemini and Open-Source Text Embeddings Now in BigQuery ML

🚀 Google expanded BigQuery ML to generate embeddings from Gemini and over 13,000 open-source text-embedding models via Hugging Face, all callable with simple SQL. The post summarizes model tiers to help teams trade off quality, cost, and scalability, and introduces Gemini's Tokens Per Minute (TPM) quota for throughput control. It shows a practical workflow to deploy OSS models to Vertex AI endpoints, run ML.GENERATE_EMBEDDING for batch jobs, and undeploy to minimize idle costs, plus a Colab tutorial and cost/scale guidance.

Data Science Agent Adds BigQuery ML, DataFrames, and Spark

🧭 Google Cloud has expanded the Data Science Agent in Colab Enterprise notebooks to support BigQuery ML, BigQuery DataFrames and Spark, enabling large-scale data transformation, model training, and inference directly on BigQuery or via Serverless for Apache Spark. The agent can now auto-retrieve BigQuery table metadata and lets you add tables via an @ mention from your current project to provide prompt context. To invoke frameworks, include keywords such as BigQuery ML, BigFrames, or PySpark; sample prompts are provided to guide forecasting, supervised learning, and dimensionality reduction workflows. Notable limitations: generated PySpark targets Spark 4.0 and @ mentions only search the current project; BigQuery improvements are available now in BigQuery notebooks and coming soon to Vertex AI.

Oklahoma DOT Modernizes Bridge Management with Google Cloud

🔍 ODOT teamed with Google Cloud and North Highland to centralize decades of bridge inspection, location, and maintenance data into BigQuery and govern it with Dataplex, creating a single trusted source for analysis. Non-technical and technical staff can query complex datasets conversationally through Gemini in Looker, while BigQuery ML powers predictive models to flag at-risk bridges ahead of failures. Secure sharing via Analytics Hub and unified governance enables better resource allocation, improved safety, and faster, data-driven decisions across the agency.

New Practical Guide to Data Science with Google Cloud

📘 Google Cloud has published a new ebook, A Practical Guide to Data Science with Google Cloud, aimed at practitioners adopting an AI-first approach across BigQuery, Vertex AI, and Serverless for Apache Spark. The guide emphasizes unified, streamlined workflows enabled by a central notebook experience that blends SQL, Python, and Spark and includes assistive features in Colab Enterprise to generate multi-step plans and code. It explains how a unified data foundation lets teams manage structured and unstructured data together and use familiar SQL to process documents and images. The ebook also offers real-world use cases with linked notebooks so practitioners can run the examples and accelerate delivery.

Google Cloud and SAP: Unified Data, AI Agents, and HANA

🚀 Google Cloud and SAP announced tighter integration to unify enterprise data and accelerate intelligent automation. SAP Business Data Cloud now connects to BigQuery via Datasphere, enabling bidirectional replication and AI-ready analytics. Procurement is simplified on the Google Cloud Marketplace with SAP BTP. New agent tooling—Agentspace, the Agent Development Kit, A2A and MCP standards—and expanded M4 memory-optimized VMs certified for SAP HANA aim to speed deployments, improve data consistency, and enable autonomous process automation.

BigQuery's CMETA: Column Metadata Index for Scale Performance

🔍 BigQuery's new Column Metadata (CMETA) index is an automated, highly scalable metadata index that improves query pruning and reduces compute for extremely large tables. CMETA stores snapshots of block- and column-level statistics and is maintained transparently by BigQuery with no user intervention. Early adopters report up to 60x faster queries and up to 10x lower slot usage for selective filters, particularly on clustered columns.

Tata Steel Enhances Monitoring with Google Cloud MDE

🏭 Tata Steel implemented a unified manufacturing data foundation on Google Cloud, centralizing OT and IT sources into a Manufacturing Data Engine built on BigQuery. The multi-path ingestion architecture leverages partners such as Litmus and ClearBlade to collect real-time PLC telemetry, while SAP, APIs, and in-house sensors feed batch and staging pipelines. The design emphasizes secure upstaging, partitioned storage with archival to Cloud Storage, and enables predictive maintenance, environmental KPI reporting, and reduced human presence in hazardous areas.

StreamSight: AI-Powered Music Royalty Forecasting Tool

🔍 StreamSight is an AI-driven application developed by BMG in partnership with Google Cloud to improve transparency, speed, and accuracy in digital royalty forecasting and anomaly detection. The solution leverages BigQuery ML models (including ARIMA_PLUS and BOOSTED_TREE), uses Vertex AI and Python for training, and surfaces results in Looker Studio dashboards. It flags missing sales periods, rights mismatches, and sudden streaming spikes to reduce manual review and help accelerate fairer payouts. Currently a proof of concept, StreamSight is positioned for broader DSP integrations and richer data inputs to extend its capabilities.

BigQuery Managed Disaster Recovery Adds Soft Failover

🔁 Soft failover in BigQuery Managed Disaster Recovery defers promotion of secondary compute and datasets until replication is confirmed, reducing the risk of data loss during planned disaster recovery tests. Unlike hard failover, which may promote immediately and accept RPO gaps to restore service, soft failover coordinates primary and secondary acquiescence to ensure data integrity. Available via the BigQuery UI, DDL, and CLI, it provides administrators with controlled, realistic DR drills without compromising production data.