Mercury, the Roman god of commerce, is often depicted carrying a purse, symbolic of business transactions, wearing winged sandals, illustrating his abilities to move at great speeds. Transactions power the world’s business systems today, ranging from millions of packages moving worldwide tracked in real time by logistics companies to global payments from personal loans to securities trading to intergovernmental transactions, keeping goods and services flowing worldwide.

June is the month which holds the summer solstice, and (at least in the northern hemisphere) we enjoy the longest days of sunshine out of the entire year. Just as the sun is making its longest trips across the sky, the BigQuery team is delighted to announce our next set of user-friendly SQL features.

When ATB Financial decided to migrate its vast SAP landscape to the cloud, the primary goal was to focus on things that matter to customers as opposed to IT infrastructure. Based in Alberta, Canada, ATB Financial serves over 800,000 customers through hundreds of branches as well as digital banking options. To keep pace with competition from large banks and FinTech startups and to meet the increasing 24/7 demands of customers, digital transformation was a must.

Today we’re announcing preview availability of a new public dataset for Google Trends. For the first time we’re bringing Google-owned Search data into Google Cloud Datasets for convenient analysis in BigQuery, or through your favorite business intelligence tools.

Google’s cloud data warehouse, BigQuery, has enabled organizations around the world to accelerate their digital transformation and empower their data analysts to unlock actionable insights from their data. Using BigQuery ML, data analysts are able to create sophisticated machine learning models with just SQL and uncover predictive insights from their data much faster.

Starting this week, we’re adding new content to the BigQuery Spotlight Youtube series. Throughout the summer we’ll be adding new videos and blog posts focused on helping new BigQuery architects and administrators master the fundamentals. You can find complimentary material for the topics discussed in the official BigQuery documentation.

Data security is an ongoing concern for anyone managing a data warehouse. Organizations need to control access to data, down to the granular level, for secure access to data both internally and externally. With the complexity of data platforms increasing day by day, it's become even more critical to identify and monitor access to sensitive data.

BigQuery Reservations help manage your BigQuery workloads. With flat-rate pricing, you can purchase BigQuery slot commitments in 100-slot increments in either flex, monthly, or yearly plans instead of paying for queries on demand. You can then create/manage buckets of slots called reservations and assign projects, folders, or organizations to use the slots in these reservations. By default, queries running in a reservation automatically use idle slots from other reservations.