Harnessing the power of Google’s cloud: Google BigQuery Analytics book extract
August 15, 2014
Grazed from CloudComputingNews. Author: Jordan Tigani and Siddartha Naidu.
When you run your queries via BigQuery, you put a giant cluster of machines to work for you. Although the BigQuery clusters represent only a small fraction of Google’s global fleet, each query cluster is measured in the thousands of cores. When BigQuery needs to grow, there are plenty of resources that can be harnessed to meet the demand.
If you want to, you could probably figure out the size of one of BigQuery’s compute clusters by carefully controlling the size of data being scanned in your queries. The number of processor cores involved is in the thousands, the number of disks in the hundreds of thousands. Most organizations don’t have the budget to build at that kind of scale just to run some queries over their data. The benefits of the Google cloud go beyond the amount of hardware that is used, however. A massive datacenter is useless unless you can keep it running…
If you have a cluster of 100,000 disks, some reasonable number of those disks is going to fail every day. If you have thousands of servers, some of the power supplies are going to die every day. Even if you have highly reliable software running on those servers, some of them are going to crash every day…
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