BigQuery, a powerful data warehousing and analytics solution provided by Google Cloud Platform (GCP), offers various tools that enable users to visualize data effectively. These tools facilitate the exploration, analysis, and interpretation of large datasets, helping users gain valuable insights and make informed decisions. In this answer, we will discuss some of the prominent tools that can be used to visualize data in BigQuery.
1. Google Data Studio:
Google Data Studio is a free and user-friendly tool that allows users to create interactive and customizable dashboards, reports, and visualizations using data from BigQuery. It provides a drag-and-drop interface, making it easy to create visually appealing charts, graphs, tables, and maps. Data Studio also supports real-time data updates, collaboration, and sharing capabilities, enabling users to collaborate and present their findings effectively.
Example: With Google Data Studio, you can create a dashboard that displays sales performance metrics, such as revenue, units sold, and top-selling products, using data from BigQuery. You can visualize this data using various charts, such as bar charts, line charts, and pie charts, to gain insights into sales trends and make data-driven business decisions.
2. Looker:
Looker is a powerful data exploration and visualization tool that integrates seamlessly with BigQuery. It provides a web-based interface that allows users to build interactive dashboards, reports, and visualizations using SQL queries. Looker's intuitive interface enables users to explore and analyze data easily, create custom visualizations, and share insights with others. It also offers advanced features like data modeling, scheduling, and alerting.
Example: Using Looker, you can create a dashboard that visualizes customer behavior metrics, such as customer lifetime value, churn rate, and acquisition channels, using data from BigQuery. You can use various visualization types, such as heatmaps, scatter plots, and treemaps, to uncover patterns and trends in customer data, allowing you to optimize marketing strategies and improve customer retention.
3. Tableau:
Tableau is a widely used data visualization tool that can connect to BigQuery as a data source. It provides a rich set of features and a drag-and-drop interface, allowing users to create interactive dashboards, reports, and visualizations without the need for coding. Tableau offers a wide range of visualization options, including charts, maps, and graphs, and provides advanced analytics capabilities like forecasting, clustering, and trend analysis.
Example: With Tableau, you can create a dashboard that visualizes financial data, such as revenue, expenses, and profitability, using data from BigQuery. You can use features like drill-down, filters, and calculated fields to explore the data in detail and gain insights into financial performance. Tableau's interactive visualizations enable users to interact with the data and answer ad-hoc questions on the fly.
4. DataGrip:
DataGrip, a powerful IDE for SQL development, also supports data visualization capabilities for BigQuery. It provides a visual query builder and a result set viewer that allows users to visualize query results in various formats, such as tables, charts, and diagrams. DataGrip's visualization features enable users to understand query results quickly and identify patterns or anomalies in the data.
Example: Using DataGrip, you can write a SQL query to retrieve customer demographic data from BigQuery and visualize it as a bar chart. You can customize the chart's appearance, apply filters, and perform aggregations to gain insights into customer demographics, such as age distribution or gender representation.
BigQuery offers a range of tools that enable users to visualize data effectively. Google Data Studio, Looker, Tableau, and DataGrip are some of the popular tools that can be used to create interactive dashboards, reports, and visualizations using data from BigQuery. Each tool has its own unique features and capabilities, allowing users to explore, analyze, and present data in a visually appealing and meaningful way.
Other recent questions and answers regarding BigQuery:
- What are the different methods to interact with BigQuery?
- What is BigQuery ML and how does it work?
- How does BigQuery support data analysis?
- What are the two ways to ingest data into BigQuery?
More questions and answers:
- Field: Cloud Computing
- Programme: EITC/CL/GCP Google Cloud Platform (go to the certification programme)
- Lesson: GCP basic concepts (go to related lesson)
- Topic: BigQuery (go to related topic)
- Examination review

