Google Cloud Analytics Hub

Sharing data is essential to foster a data driven culture, data exchanges can be private or public data exchanges. BigQuery is a powerful analytics platform and supports analytics and data exchanges, to make data exchange more easier Google Cloud has introduced Analytics Hub which allows to exchange valuable data and analytics assets in secure and efficient manner. Analytics hub gives secure and privacy safe data sharing and also an opportunity to monetize the data across organizations.

Analytics Hub is built on top of BigQuery which gives decoupled storage and compute enabling scalable data sharing and other features of BigQuery. Analytics Hub uses publisher and subscriber model of BigQuery Datasets where Publishers are charged for data storage, whereas the subscribers are charged for querying against the shared data.

Components of Analytics Hub:

Shared Datasets: A shared dataset is a BigQuery dataset that is the unit of data sharing in Analytics Hub. As a publisher, you create or use an existing BigQuery dataset in your project.

Data Exchanges: A shared dataset is a BigQuery dataset that is the unit of data sharing in Analytics Hub. As a publisher, you create or use an existing BigQuery dataset in your project. Data Exchanges can be Private [default] or Public.

Listings: A shared dataset is a BigQuery dataset that is the unit of data sharing in Analytics Hub. As a publisher, you create or use an existing BigQuery dataset in your project. Again listing can be Private or Public.

Linked Datasets: A shared dataset is a BigQuery dataset that is the unit of data sharing in Analytics Hub which sits in publisher project. As a publisher, you create or use an existing BigQuery dataset in your project.

Getting started….

Analytics Hub service can be found inside BigQuery in the Google Cloud console, if not found then you need to enable the Analytics Hub API by simply searching it on the Google Cloud console.

Once you are on the Analytics Hub, in the Exchange Project, create an Exchange by providing the details and setting up the permissions for both Publisher and Subscriber projects.

Now the exchange is created, we go to the Publisher dataset, now we need to create a listing in the Publisher datasets. Click the Exchange which you have created, then create on Listing.

Once all the required details are filled, listing is created and is published for subscribers to subscribe to this listing. Now go to Subscribers project, click Add Data > Analytics Hub

Select the Dataset which you published or any other dataset which you want to subscribe from the listings. Click Add Dataset to Project. This will create linked Dataset in your Subscriber project and you can run your queries against this Datasets objects like Tables, Views, etc. Since its a linked dataset, any updates to the dataset, it will automatically reflect in this linked datasets.

There is no additional cost for managing data exchanges or listings. Analytics Hub publishers are charged for data storage, whereas subscribers pay for queries that run against the shared data based on either on-demand or flat-rate pricing model.

This is a great feature and can be a great support for data driven organizations.

Appendix:

If you find this article useful, then do give a clap and kindly follow me for more such contents in data and cloud space. Thank You.