General comments

[andrewluetgers]

We use BigQuery extensively both for production real-time queries of our data and batch processing that builds those tables in the first place. BigQuery was a major enabling technology for us and remains almost magical in how powerful and affordable it is. We also use BQML extensively as it eliminates much of the work to do basic machine learning. It runs in the same environment as the database queries, not code to write, no data transfer. We also use Matillion for BigQuery for all of our workflows. ELT vs ETL so SQL is an essential skill set but its visual programming environment provides common touch-point between all parties and very productive environment to work in.