BigQuery SandBox - A Guide for the Beginners | MarkMeets | Celebrity News, Music, Movies, TV, London Film Premieres

Google BigQuery is a leading Data Warehouse solution currently in the marketplace. It is a serverless platform that enables you to gain advanced and informative insights on enterprise data, using standard SQL queries. Employing a serverless architecture allows it to be highly scalable, along with an interactive web-based user interface that helps it become one of the most sought-after data warehouse solutions.

Even with all these features, users usually tend to try the product before paying for it and Google provides a BigQuery Sandbox to deal with this. A BigQuery Sandbox is a tool that enables users to experience BigQuery with certain limitations. Almost all the functionality of the paid version of BigQuery is provided on BigQuery Sandbox with scaling and performance limitations.

In this guide, you will get a comprehensive overview of BigQuery Sandbox along with the steps to use one.

What is BigQuery Sandbox?

BigQuery Sandbox is a provision provided by Google to experience BigQuery capabilities at no cost and verify if it fulfills all requirements. Using the BigQuery Sandbox, you can use Google’s cloud console and BigQuery platform without requiring you to enter your credit card details, billing details, or anything else.

BigQuery Sandbox provides a Query capacity of about 1 terabyte every month and 10 gigabytes of free storage. It also enables the provision for creating up to 1 terabyte of BigQuery BI engine capacity. The retention policy of the Sandbox for all the tables and partitions is about 60 days. It also provides a comprehensive hands-on on the graphical user interface of Google’s Bigquery. You can also link the Firebase to Bigquery and use the BigQuery Sandbox.

All the features of the full-fledged BigQuery are not present in the BigQuery Sandbox. It misses out on features like data streaming, DML, and data transfer services. It comes out to be a lite version of the standard platform that allows you to experience most of the functionality and only the features that are thought to be not much needed are removed from the Sandbox.

To access all the features and functionality of BiGquery you can upgrade from a Sandbox account to a paid one by just following a few instructions on the screen. Sandbox is free and accessible to anyone with a google account.

Steps to Use Sandbox

Step 1: Log in to your google account.

Step 2: Navigate to Google Cloud Platform, or by clicking on https://console.cloud.google.com/

Step 3: A pop-up will appear. Select the country and accept the “Terms of Service” checkbox. Then click on the “AGREE AND CONTINUE” button

Step 4: You will see a screen like the one below, go to the search bar

Step 5: Search for BigQuery and you will see a page like the one below:

Step 6: Click on the CREATE PROJECT button

Step 7: Name the project, select the organization (if using the sandbox from organizational email), and the location.

Step 8: Click on the edit option below the project name

Step 9: A project Id will appear, change the id (if required) so that i can be easily remembered. In this case, we will keep it the same.

Step 10: Now click on the CREATE button and the project will be created with the following screen showing up.

As you can see, the project is created in the sandbox, with the name on the right and a tutorial for using the graphical user interface of the Google Cloud Platform.

Upgrade your Sandbox account:

Step 1: Navigate to the google cloud platform account or go to this link, https://console.cloud.google.com/bigquery

Step 2: At the home screen click on the Upgrade button present just below the user icon on the right-hand side.

Step 3: Click on the CREATE BILLING ACCOUNT option from the pop up window:

Step 4: Select the country details and select the best suitable option for the question “What best describes your organization or needs?” from the drop-down menu as shown.

Step 5: Click on the continue button after reading and accepting the terms of service checkbox.

Step 6: A new page will open those details various aspects like account type, name of business, payment methods along with twitching the card details, tax information, and many more

Step 7: After all the details are filled click on the START MY FREE TRIAL button

Now you have access to all the features of Google BigQuery along with a lot more storage and processing limits. This would allow you to gain more insights into the data without worrying about space and query constraints.

Conclusion

BigQuery is one of the leading Data warehouse solutions in the marketplace. This platform has many features that help in gaining valuable insights into enterprise data. Google Cloud platform provides a provision to experience the bigquery without paying for it through its BigQuery Sandbox utility. This helps in understanding the bigquery platform comprehensively by examining most of its features and determining if BigQuery is the best match for the organization. This article tried to give a comprehensive overview of the Sandbox and the steps to set up a sandbox account and use it. It also gave a guide on upgrading from Sandbox to a full-fledged BigQuery account.

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