Unlock the power of geospatial analysis and visualization with BigQuery and Tableau

In today's data-driven world, organizations are constantly seeking efficient and scalable solutions to store, analyze, and visualize vast amounts of geospatial data. This is where the combination of Google BigQuery and Tableau comes into play. BigQuery offers a robust and scalable platform for storing and analyzing geospatial data, while Tableau provides powerful visualization capabilities. In this blog post, we will explore how the integration of these two tools can unlock the full potential of geospatial data analysis and visualization. 

BigQuery: A ideal solution for geospatial data analysis
BigQuery stands out as a strong choice for organizations dealing with large volumes of geospatial data. With its lightning-fast performance and efficient SQL-like queries, BigQuery outperforms traditional data analysis methods. It seamlessly integrates with the Google Cloud ecosystem and offers a holistic approach to geospatial data management. Its integration with other Google Cloud products and services, such as Google Maps Platform, Cloud Storage, and Cloud Dataflow, allows users to build end-to-end geospatial applications and workflows at scale.

Tableau: Empowering geospatial visualization
The partnership between Google Cloud and Tableau enables analysts to visualize data backed by the scalability of Google Cloud. By hosting Tableau Server on GCP, customers can modernize their analytics environment and future-proof their infrastructure. Tableau’s BigQuery connector allows customers to engineer data pipelines with direct connections to power business-critical reporting, and this article shows how to get the most out of this connector for spatial visualization. When it comes to geospatial data, Tableau offers a plethora of built-in geographic features and data connectors, making it easy to map and analyze data at various levels of detail, from a single city block to a global view. 

Challenges and solutions

While Tableau's geospatial visualization capabilities are remarkable, it's important to note that the current Tableau BigQuery connection has limitations. Geometry fields cannot be directly displayed in Tableau, and full BigQuery geospatial support, including polygon geometry, is not available. However, there is a workaround using Tableau’s Web Map Service (WMS) integration.

Unlocking full geospatial potential with WMS
Tableau supports WMS as a background map, and by leveraging Geoserver as a middleware component, it becomes possible to pass WMS requests from Tableau to BigQuery. This is made possible by a new BigQuery driver for Geoserver. This setup allows users to incorporate geospatial data stored in BigQuery seamlessly into their Tableau visualizations. By utilizing Google Cloud components like Dataflow, geospatial data files can be ingested into BigQuery and stored in a geometry column. Geoserver acts as a bridge, serving WMS requests for Tableau to consume.

To address this, we have created a comprehensive guide that serves as your go-to reference for using Tableau WMS effectively with BigQuery. This guide will equip you with the knowledge and step-by-step instructions needed to incorporate geospatial data into your Tableau visualizations.

The path to geospatial insights

With this integration, organizations can unlock the full power of geospatial data analysis and visualization, effortlessly combining the scalability and efficiency of BigQuery with the intuitive and powerful visualization capabilities of Tableau. The result is the ability to gain valuable insights from complex geospatial data sets, enabling informed decision-making and innovative solutions.

You can view the full guide on github. The document is designed to be user-friendly and comprehensive, providing you with the resources you need to integrate Tableau and BigQuery for geospatial analysis and visualization.