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Google fills BigQuery with public data, invites world+dog to play

You'll never guess how much it costs

In its latest move confirming the company's ascension to deity-level entrepreneurship, Google is now selling public data back to the public through its BigQuery analytics engine.

The Chocolate Factory has inserted some delicious public data nougat into its BigQuery confectionery service, pointing out that it "pays for the storage of these data sets" and as such is justified in them back to the public at $5 per TB query.

Customers get their first monthly $5 taster for free.

BigQuery is Mountain View's Analytics-as-a-Service (AaaS) chute, which is internally replicated by the proprietary "Dremel" data analysis tool. At a low price, it will allow passing strangers to probe it with SQL commands.

Among the six public data sets currently hosted by BigQuery is one containing "3.5 million digitized books stretching back two centuries, encompassing the complete English-language public domain collections of the Internet Archive (1.3 million volumes) and HathiTrust (2.2 million volumes)."

Another contains "all stories and comments from Hacker News from its launch in 2006. Each story contains a story ID, the author that made the post, when it was written, and the number of points the story received."

As users' first terabyte of data is on the house, users can start analysing the public datasets using SQL queries without enabling billing. The BigQuery public datasets are accessible through Google's web UI, through its the command-line tool, or "by making calls to the BigQuery REST API using a variety of client libraries such as Java, .NET, or Python." ®

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