BigQuery, Google’s cloud service for fast queries over large volumes of structured data, now includes a function for determining the correlation between two variables. Upload some data, enter some SQL code, get back a Pearson correlation score (you know, the scale from -1.0 to 1.0 where -1.0 means a perfect negative correlation, 1.0 means a perfect positive correlation and zero means no correlation.)
Google’s Felipe Hoffa showed off the new capability in a blog post on Thursday, using data collected from the sensors the company had placed throughout San Francisco’s Moscone Center during the Google I/O conference in May. Here’s an example of a query trying to find correlations without much specific targeting of values:
And here is the result in a table:
Of course, as the feature image highlights, these tables can easily be turned into graphs so the naked eye can compare selected values.
Google BigQuery isn’t for everyone or every class of data — obviously — but it’s advancing at a pretty rapid pace since its initial release in May 2012. At the very least, it’s likely a lot faster, cheaper and easier than buying an analytic database system, and save for 1010data (which is a bit more business-focused), I’m not sure of too many similar services.
Barak Regev, head of Google’s enterprise-focused cloud business for EMEA, will be speaking about the company’s litany of cloud services at our Structure: Europe event Sept. 18 and 19 in London.
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