Data Exploration and Preparation with BigQuery: A practical guide to cleaning, transforming, and analyzing data for business insights

Learn to understand and prepare data using BigQuery to make your data accurate, reliable, and ready for analysis and modeling

Key Features

• Learn how to explore and prepare data with the BigQuery web UI (Cloud Console) and bq command line interface using real data sources
• Best practices for optimizing processing, storage, and query performance in BigQuery
• Six hands on exercises including: loading and transforming data, analyzing Google Trends in notebooks, creating visualizations in Looker Studio, as well as full solutions for analyzing advertising, transportation, and customer support data

Book Description
Data professionals encounter a multitude of challenges such as handling large volumes of data, dealing with data silos, and the lack of appropriate tools. Datasets often arrive in different conditions and formats demanding considerable time from analysts engineers, and scientists to process and uncover insights. The complexity of the data life cycle often hinders teams and organizations from extracting the desired value from their data assets. Data Exploration and Preparation with BigQuery offers a holistic solution to these challenges.

The book begins with the basics of BigQuery while covering the fundamentals of data exploration and preparation. It then progresses to demonstrate how to use BigQuery for these tasks and explores the array of big data tools at your disposal within the Google Cloud ecosystem.

The book doesn’t merely offer theoretical insights; its a hands-on companion that walks you through properly structuring your tables for efficiency and ensures adherence to data preparation best practices. You’ll also learn when to use Dataflow, BigQuery, and Dataprep for ETL and ELT workflows. The book will skillfully guide you through various case studies, demonstrating how BigQuery can be used to solve real-world data problems.

By the end of this book, you’ll have mastered the use of SQL to explore and prepare datasets in BigQuery unlocking deeper insights from data.

What you will learn

• Assess the quality of a dataset and learn best practices for data cleansing
• Prepare data for data analysis, visualization, and for machine learning
• Explore approaches to visualize data in BigQuery
• Apply acquired knowledge to real-life scenarios and design pattern
• Set up and organize BigQuery resources
• Use SQL and other tools to navigate datasets
• Implement best practices for querying BigQuery datasets
• Gain proficiency in using data preparation tools, techniques, and strategies

Who This Book Is For
This book is for data analysts who want to learn how to explore and prepare data using BigQuery. If you are a data analyst who is experienced in SQL, reporting, data modeling, and transformation, and looking to begin using BigQuery, this book is for you.

Business users who want to understand how to use BigQuery to make better data driven decisions will also benefit from this book. Program and project manager and other data professionals will also benefit from this books easy to follow approach. This book is excellent for any individuals who are planning to use BigQuery as a data warehouse to provide insights to their business from large datasets.