Google makes BigQuery available in Sheets

All this fancy stuff, but where&#x27;s my Sets at? Google took down the website like 15 years ago. I used that thing <i>daily</i>. Then they put it into Google Sheets. You could type &quot;apple&quot; then &quot;pear&quot; then &quot;orange&quot; and then select cells, drag, and you&#x27;d get a list of fruits! Some you never heard of before!<p>I looked around and Google has a patent on it, and seemingly no public implementation. This makes me super sad because I honestly considered Sets one of the most useful exploration and ideation tools ever created.<p>BigQuery in Sheets, cool I guess? I want Sets back.

For all the complaints about spreadsheets, attempts to replace them and such... They are a very reslilient paradigm.<p>The way the paradigm and learning curve work just seems to work for a lot of people. I reckon it&#x27;s still the most popular plaform for coding, data engineering, analytics &amp; data science... using liberal definitions for all those terms.<p>It also seems like something that&#x27;s in google&#x27;s wheelhouse.

I wish spreadsheets didn&#x27;t get as much unnecessary hate as they do. They are a pretty great tool, and can do almost anything. They are to finance&#x2F;accounting guys as shells are to many of us.

Googles own blog [1] announcing the feature for G Suite Business, from back in January. This is a great feature that I have been searching for, for a long time.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cloud.google.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;products&#x2F;g-suite&#x2F;connecting-bigquery-and-google-sheets-to-help-with-hefty-data-analysis" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cloud.google.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;products&#x2F;g-suite&#x2F;connecting-bi...</a>

How does pricing work here? Say I have a pivot table on underlying 10TB data. I share the sheet with 10 people, each one refreshes it 100 times a day. Do I pay for each data refresh, ie 10TB * 10 * 100= 10000TB&#x2F;day, that would be $50000&#x2F;day if I read the pricing table right. Can someone more familiar with bigquery verify that?

Similar functionality called PowerPivot&#x2F;PowerQuery[1][2] exists in Excel. It&#x27;s hands down one of my favorite things to use Excel for, and also one of the least understood&#x2F;known features by most Excel users.<p>I can&#x27;t wait to see how Google&#x27;s flavor of it for Sheets works.<p>[1] It&#x27;s officially called &quot;Get &amp; Transform&quot; now, but when it came out one Excel 2010 it was called PowerQuery, and still gets referenced that way everywhere (including the official help docs).<p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.office.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;article&#x2F;get-transform-in-excel-881c63c6-37c5-4ca2-b616-59e18d75b4de" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.office.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;article&#x2F;get-transform-in-ex...</a>

I’ve had trouble getting more than 10k rows in google sheets. It will be interesting to see how well this works.

I&#x27;ve tried using the current version of Sheets App Script for some advanced business functionality, but it&#x27;s horrendously slow - taking over 10 seconds to loop over just 5000 rows. And they&#x27;re using an ancient version of js, making development annoying.<p>I really hope that this announcement would herald a renewed interest on their side in improving Sheets as a whole.

It&#x27;s worth noting that there has been a Sheets connector for BigQuery since January, although only for G Suite customers: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cloud.google.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;products&#x2F;g-suite&#x2F;connecting-bigquery-and-google-sheets-to-help-with-hefty-data-analysis" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cloud.google.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;products&#x2F;g-suite&#x2F;connecting-bi...</a><p>This announcement seems like an expansion on what&#x27;s above (e.g. pivot tables). I&#x27;ve tested what&#x27;s above for my org and there&#x27;s a lot of promise. (only criticism is creating formulas in the query don&#x27;t work automatically since they are returned as Text cells; workaround is to cast as Automatic)

Last time I checked, it was still hard to get a Google CloudSQL DB into BigQuery, so I’m surprised they did the sheets integration first. We used a third party that just copied data from our CloudSQL to BigQuery.

If you find this interesting you should take a look at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sigmacomputing.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sigmacomputing.com&#x2F;</a>

I wish Google would let individual users upgrade to GSuite Business to try these tools, rather than forcing the whole organization to upgrade. The pricing model is impractical.

How&#x27;s bigquery performance in comparison to clickhouse? When is it worth switching from one to the other?

Cool. I wonder when they will shut it down.<p>I largely ignore Google products announcements these days. Why bother getting excited about things that won&#x27;t last?

&gt; The beta of connected sheets should go live within the next few months.<p>In case anyone’s looking for it, there’s the buried lede. Whenever Google announces something like this, don’t hold your breath. Remember that robo-calling assistant they demoed awhile back? I remember that should’ve gone live within a few months, too.