_YYYYMMDD suffix pattern just like everyone else. This works fine, but it's quite cumbersome, has some hard limits, and your SQL can quickly becomes unruly.
Then about a year ago, the BigQuery team released ingestion time partitioning. This allowed users to partition tables based on the load/arrival time of the data, or by explicitly stating the partition to load the data into (using the $ syntax). By using the _PARTITIONTIME pseudo-column, users were more easily able to craft their SQL, and save costs by only addressing the necessary partition(s). It was a major milestone for the BigQuery engineering team, and we were quick to adopt it into our data pipelines. We rejoiced and gave each other a lot of high-fives.
Warning: This post contains pictures of spiders (and Spiderman)!
Google’s new Cloud AutoML Vision is a new machine learning service from Google Cloud that aims to make state of the art machine learning techniques accessible to non-machine learning experts. In this post I will show you how I was able, in just a few hours, to create a custom image classifier that is able to distinguish between different types of poisonous Australian spiders. I didn’t have any data when I started and it only required a very basic understanding of machine learning related concepts. I could probably show my Mum how to do it!
Shine's good friend Felipe Hoffa from Google was in Melbourne recently, and he took the time to catch up with our resident Google Developer Expert, Graham Polley. But, instead of just sitting down over a boring old coffee, they decided to take an iconic tram ride...
Recommendation systems are found under the hood of many popular services and websites. The e-commerce and retail industry use them to increase their sales, the music services provide interesting songs to their listeners, and the news sites rank the daily articles based on their readers interests. If you really think about it, recommendation systems can be used in pretty much every area of daily life. For example, why not automatically recommend better choices to house investors, guide your friends in your hometown without you being around, or suggest which company to apply to if you are looking for a job.
All pretty cool stuff, right!
But, recommendation systems need to be a lot smarter than a plain old vanilla software. In fact, the engine is made up of multiple machine learning modules that aim to rank the items of the interests for the users based on the users preferences and items properties.
In this blog series, you will gain some insight on how recommendation systems work, how you can harness Google Cloud Platform for scalable systems, and the architecture we used when implementing our music recommendation engine on the cloud. This first post will be a light introduction to the overall system, and my follow up articles will subsequently deep dive into each of the machine learning modules, and the tech that powers them.
Do you recoil in horror at the thought of running yet another mundane SQL script just so a table is automatically rebuilt for you each day in BigQuery? Can you barely remember your name first thing in the morning, let alone remember to click "Run Query" so that your boss gets the latest data refreshed in his fancy Data Studio charts, and then takes all the credit for your hard work?
Well, fear not my fellow BigQuery'ians. There's a solution to this madness.
It's simple.
It's quick.
Yes, it's Google Apps Script to the rescue.
Disclaimer: all credit for this goes to the one and only Felipe Hoffa. He 'da man!
In this post I'll talk about how we used table partitions to increase the performance of our queries and avoid query slowdowns.
