Querying massive datasets can be time consuming and expensive without the right hardware and infrastructure. Google BigQuery solves this problem by enabling super-fast, SQL queries against append-mostly tables, using the processing power of Google's infrastructure.
In order to use this library, you first need to go through the following steps:
- Select or create a Cloud Platform project.
- Enable billing for your project.
- Enable the Google Cloud BigQuery API.
- Setup Authentication.
Install this library in a virtualenv using pip. virtualenv is a tool to create isolated Python environments. The basic problem it addresses is one of dependencies and versions, and indirectly permissions.
With virtualenv, it's possible to install this library without needing system install permissions, and without clashing with the installed system dependencies.
pip install virtualenv
virtualenv <your-env>
source <your-env>/bin/activate
<your-env>/bin/pip install google-cloud-bigquery
pip install virtualenv
virtualenv <your-env>
<your-env>\Scripts\activate
<your-env>\Scripts\pip.exe install google-cloud-bigquery
from google.cloud import bigquery
client = bigquery.Client()
# Perform a query.
QUERY = (
'SELECT name FROM `bigquery-public-data.usa_names.usa_1910_2013` '
'WHERE state = "TX" '
'LIMIT 100')
query_job = client.query(QUERY) # API request
rows = query_job.result() # Waits for query to finish
for row in rows:
print(row.name)