Google BigQuery Adds Batch Query, Excel Connector Features

Following last month’s launch of the Google Cloud Partner Program, which (among other things) gave partners access to Google BigQuery, Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) has launched two new features to help partners get a handle on Big Data.

As part of BigQuery, which gives partners the ability to import data from on-premise and cloud data sources for analysis, the new features will give partners two new ways to work with Big Data, the Google Enterprise Blog reports.

BigQuery provides a way to get insights into Big Data quickly, but in his blog post, product manager Ju-kay Kwek noted, “We understand that there are important, non-interactive queries, such as nightly reports, that businesses also need to run.” That’s where the new batch query features comes in. Google channel partners now can designate queries as batch queries that will take a matter of hours to complete. Pricing for this feature through Google’s self-service model is 2 cents per Gigabyte processed for batch queries and 3.5 cents per Gigabyte processed for interactive queries.

The second feature will extend BigQuery’s ability to execute queries on Google spreadsheets to Microsoft Excel. The Google spreadsheet query feature uses Google Apps Script integration, and the new BigQuery Connector for Excel will essentially provide the same service for those with big Excel spreadsheets. Kwen wrote that it will be a feature for analysts and executives to “use spreadsheets to explore large data sets.”

Connector for Excel uses Excel’s standard web query feature “to eliminate the extra work of manually importing data and running queries directly within Excel,” Kwen wrote.

About the same time Google was announcing these new features to BigQuery, the company also announced on its blog that Google+ is being brought into the business world. Google Apps product management director Clay Bavor wrote that new business-specific features were being launched for free from now until the end of next year, at which point Google plans to tack on a fee.

One of the new features is private sharing for organizations, which gives customers more control over the content they post to Google+. Posts now can be marked as restricted, granting access only to others within your organization. Additionally, video meetings have been integrated into Gmail, Calendar and Docs apps,  following the July launch of multi-way video chat, powered by Hangouts. New Google+ administrative controls for businesses are also being added.

According to Google, these new Google+ business features are just scratching the surface. The company hinted at more features to come, including a mobile version of Google+ for enterprise users.