Introduction to BigQuery Geographic Information Systems (GIS)

In a data warehouse like BigQuery, location information is very common. Many critical business decisions revolve around location data. For example, you may record the latitude and longitude of your delivery vehicles or packages over time. You may also record customer transactions and join the data to another table with store location data.

You can use this type of location data to determine when a package is likely to arrive or to determine which customers should receive a mailer for a particular store location. BigQuery GIS allows you to analyze and visualize geospatial data in BigQuery by using geography data types and standard SQL geography functions.

Limitations

BigQuery GIS is subject to the following limitations:

• Geography functions are available only in standard SQL.
• Only the BigQuery client library for Python currently supports the GEOGRAPHY data type. For other client libraries, convert GEOGRAPHY values to strings using the ST_ASTEXT or ST_ASGEOJSON function. Converting to text using ST_AsText stores only one value, and converting to WKT means the data is annotated as a STRING type instead of a GEOGRAPHY type.

BigQuery GIS quotas

Quotas and limits on BigQuery GIS apply to the different types of jobs you can run against tables that contain GIS data, including the following job types:

• Loading data (load jobs)
• Exporting data (export jobs)
• Querying data (query jobs)
• Copying tables (copy jobs)

For more information on all quotas and limits, see Quotas and limits.

BigQuery GIS pricing

When you use BigQuery GIS, your charges are based on these factors:

• How much data is stored in the tables that contain BigQuery GIS data
• The queries you run against the data

For information on storage pricing, see Storage pricing.

For information on query pricing, see Query pricing.

Many table operations are free, including loading data, copying tables, and exporting data. Though free, these operations are subject to BigQuery's Quotas and limits. For information on all free operations, see Free operations on the pricing page.

Next steps

• To get started with BigQuery GIS, see Getting Started with BigQuery GIS for data analysts.
• To learn more about visualization options for BigQuery GIS, see Visualizing BigQuery GIS data.
• To learn more about working with BigQuery GIS data, see Working with BigQuery GIS data.
• For documentation on standard SQL functions in BigQuery GIS, see Geography functions in standard SQL.