In this next module, we will highlight the five common tasks of any data analyst and map those to their respective tools on Google Cloud platform. After that, we'll explore the BigQuery feature set itself and end with a discussion comparing data analysts, data scientists, and data engineers. Okay, so before we get into the really cool part, which is showing you the useful big data tools on Google Cloud platform, we first have to talk about the data analyst tasks themselves as a whole. So here are the five things that any data analyst worth their salt is going to perform. You're going to ingest data, you're going to transform it, clean it up. All data is dirty data. And then you're going to be creating some reporting data tables and storing that data for analysis, which is that fourth step. Finally, look how far we've come. It took four steps to actually get to the analysis portion where you're writing these cool, sophisticated queries to get insights from your data. And then you're pairing that, potentially, with a visualization tool or platform to really make those insights shine and explain them to people. But the road is fraught with challenges. So at each of these different steps, as we saw with some of the challenges that organizations face, or data analysts have faced earlier on, each of these different steps has their own pitfalls. So ingestion, you've got petabytes of data, it's going to bottleneck your tool. You don't even begin to imagine loading all of your data at once. So unfortunately, you're loading only in a sample or you're looking only at a small amount of your data. So you can't really make amazing progress with loading all your data in at once, or it just takes forever. Second, transforming your data. It's slow going. Perhaps you have to either rely on another team, a data engineering team, to write sophisticated pipelines to transform your data. And you wish there was an easier way to either write it yourself, or some kind of cool tool that'll help you build these things up in just a little bit of an easier way. And that was a clear spoiler alert for one of the tools you're going to be learning in the next slide. So on to storage, scaling up the amount of data that you need to store. As we mentioned before, has been a problem for organizations that have managed their own hardware internally or relied on things that aren't as inherently scalable as relying on Google Cloud platform analysis. Your queries are bottlenecking, your data is in many different places and there are no easy way to mash it together. Visualizing your insights. You have amazing insights that you want to show, and as soon as you go to present it to your stakeholders and your peers, your tool starts to lag. You want to filter down and drill down to a particular insight, and then you have a 30 minute meeting. And unfortunately, it takes the tool 10 minutes to load and drill down into that insight. And then it's you know, you've lost the audience's attention by that point as well. Let's see where the Google Cloud platform can step in. So here's the right tools for scalability, and this will help you to address and overcome a lot of these challenges. So ingestion, Google Cloud platform, BigQuery in particular, is a petabyte-scale data analytics platform. And one of the great things that we're going to cover in the ingestion part, or the pricing lab that you're going to do, is actually importing data into BigQuery in batch form is free, which is great. Transforming your data. So say you wanted to write some simple SQL. You can just do that directly inside of BigQuery. Or if you didn't even want to write any SQL, one of the cool labs we're going to do later on is using a tool called Cloud Dataprep, where you can chain together, through a graphical user interface, a neat visual flow of how you want to process the data. So say you wanted to drag and drop a deduplication and then parse this particular field. You can do that visually, and you'll get a lot of practice with that as part of this course. Storing data, again, we mentioned it a lot, Google Cloud Storage, inexpensive, Bigquery itself, you're going to see in the pricing lab, it's as of the time of this recording, is $0.02 per gigabyte per month. And if the data is there for a long time, that storage cost is cut in half. Analysis, that's really where BigQuery shines. I'm going to really go into the nine core parts of its feature set shortly. And this is managing scale, right, fully managed. No dev ops, managing it without you managing your servers, just write cool SQL. Last but not least, visualization tools. Google has built Google Data Studio, which is one of the free visualization tools that can sit on top of BigQuery. And then you let all the BigQuery processing do all of the hard, heavy lifting. And then rely on a tool like Google Data Studio or Tableau or looker or QlikView to do that visualization for you as well. So each tool for a different use case.
