Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

As more and more data is exposed via APIs either as API-first companies or for the explosion of single page apps/JAMStack, API security can no longer be an afterthought. The hard part about APIs is that it provides direct access to large amounts of data while bypassing browser precautions. Instead of worrying about SQL injection and XSS issues, you should be concerned about the bad actor who was able to paginate through all your customer records and their data.

Today, we’re announcing Data QnA, a natural language interface for analytics on BigQuery data, now in private alpha. Data QnA helps enable your business users to get answers to their analytical queries through natural language questions, without burdening business intelligence (BI) teams. This means that a business user like a sales manager can simply ask a question on their company’s dataset, and get results back that same way.

As organizations look to get smarter and more agile in how they gain value and insight from their data, they are now able to take advantage of a fundamental shift in architecture. In the last decade, as an industry, we have gone from monolithic machines with direct-attached storage to VMs to cloud. The main attraction of cloud is due to its separation of compute and storage – a major architectural shift in the infrastructure layer that changes the way data can be stored and processed.

In the lifecycle of a data warehouse in production, there are a variety of tasks that need to be executed on a recurring basis. To name a few concrete examples, scheduled tasks can be related to data ingestion (inserting data from a stream into a transactional table every 10 minutes), query performance (refreshing a materialized view used for BI reporting every hour), or warehouse maintenance (executing replication from one cluster to another on a daily basis).