In the past year, Google has worked to surface timely and reliable health information, amplify public health campaigns, and help nonprofits get urgent support to Indians in need. Now, we are continuing to focus on helping India’s businesses accelerate their digital transformation, deepening our commitment to India’s digitization and economic recovery. To support customers and the public sector in India and across Asia Pacific, we’re excited to announce that our new Google Cloud region in Delhi National Capital Region (NCR) is now open. 

Designed to help both Indian and global companies alike build highly available applications for their customers, the Delhi NCR region is our second Google Cloud region in India and 10th to open in Asia Pacific. 

What customers and partners are saying

Navigating this past year has been a challenge for companies as they grapple with changing customers demands and economic uncertainty. Technology has played a critical role, and we’ve been fortunate to partner with and serve people, companies, and government institutions around the world to help them adapt. The Google Cloud region in Delhi NCR will help our customers adapt to new requirements, new opportunities and new ways of working, like we’ve helped so many companies do in the region: 

• InMobi scaled a personalized AI platform to support 120+ million active users. “With the arrival of the Google Cloud Delhi NCR, InMobi Group sees the opportunity to continue closing the gap between our users and products,” says Mohit Saxena, Co-founder and Group CTO of Inmobi. “Glance, especially, has been serving AI-powered personalised content to over 120 million active users. We can’t wait to continue giving them truly meaningful experiences that are speedy, scale well, and are relevant to them, by expanding the use of our current tools working on Google Cloud with the opening of a new region.”
• Groww now supports a sizable user base. “Google Cloud provides great technology that enables us to build and scale infrastructure to millions of users, and the new Google Cloud region in Delhi NCR will continue to help more businesses and startups in India access powerful cloud-based infrastructure, products and services,” says Neeraj Singh, Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, Groww.
• HDFC Bank is positioned for the future. “At HDFC Bank, we are harnessing technology platforms to both run and build the bank. As we progress to be future ready, the objective is to invest in future technologies that give us scale, efficiency and resiliency. Towards this the Google Cloud region in Delhi NCR will enable us to enhance our resiliency and help us in building an active-active design framework for our new generation applications on cloud,” says Ramesh Lakshminarayanan, CIO, HDFC Bank.  
• Dr. Reddy’s Lab built a modern data platform with Google Cloud. “At Dr Reddy’s, we pride ourselves in helping patients regain good health, acting quickly to provide innovative solutions to address patients’ unmet needs and in accelerating access to medicines to people worldwide. Our Google Cloud-powered data platform is helping us realize these objectives and we welcome Google’s investment in the new Delhi NCR region as helping us and other businesses in India make further contributions to our social and economic future,” says Mukesh Rathi, Senior Vice President & CIO, Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories.
• “To survive the disruption caused by the pandemic and to succeed in the long term, organizations need to become digital natives, so they can be more agile, explore new business models and build new capabilities that boost resilience. A cloud-first strategy plays a key role in enabling businesses to do this,” said Piyush N. Singh, Lead – India market unit & lead – Growth and Strategic Client Relationships, Asia Pacific and Latin America, Accenture. “Harnessing the potential of cloud requires the right data infrastructure and this expansion by Google Cloud will undoubtedly help Indian enterprises in their digital transformation journeys.”

A global network of regions

Delhi NCR joins 25 existing Google Cloud regions connected via our high-performance network, helping customers better serve their users and customers throughout the globe. As the second region in India, customers benefit from improved business continuity planning with distributed, secure infrastructure needed to meet IT and business requirements for disaster recovery, while maintaining data sovereignty.

With this new region, Google Cloud customers operating in India also benefit from low latency and high performance of their cloud-based workloads and data. Designed for high availability, the region opens with three availability zones to protect against service disruptions, and offers a portfolio of key products, including Compute Engine, App Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Bigtable, Cloud Spanner, and BigQuery. 

Supporting India’s recovery with training and education

Google and Google Cloud will also continue to support our customers with people and education programs. We’re investing in local talent and the local developer community to help enterprises digitally transform and support economic recovery. 

Through the India Digitization Fund, we expanded our efforts to support India’s recovery from COVID-19—in particular, through programs to support education and small businesses. In addition to expanding internet access, and investments to help start-ups accelerate India’s digital transformation, we’ve grown our Grow with Google efforts. Businesses can access digital tools to maintain business continuity, find resources like quick help videos, and learn digital skills—in both English and in Hindi.

Helping customers build their transformation clouds

Google Cloud is here to support businesses, helping them get smarter with data, deploy faster, connect more easily with people and customers throughout the globe, and protect everything that matters to their businesses. The cloud region in Delhi NCR offers new technology and tools that can be a catalyst for this change. To learn more, visit the Google Cloud locations page, and be sure to watch the region launch event here.

With summer just around the corner, things are really heating up. But you’re in luck because this month BigQuery is supplying a cooler full of ice cold refreshments with this release of user-friendly SQL capabilities. 

We are pleased to announce three categories of BigQuery user-friendly SQL launches: Powerful Analytics Features, Flexible Schema Handling, and New Geospatial Tools.

Powerful Analytics Features

These powerful SQL analytics features provide greater flexibility to analysts for organizing, filtering, and rendering data in BigQuery than ever before. You can enable spreadsheet-like functionality on summarized data using PIVOT and UNPIVOT and filter irrelevant data in analytic functions using QUALIFY.

Through this section, we will become familiar with these new features through examples using the BigQuery Public dataset, usa_names.

PIVOT/UNPIVOT (Preview)

One of the most time-consuming tasks for data analytics practitioners is wrangling data into the right shape. SQL is great for wrangling data, but sometimes you want to reformat a table as you would in a spreadsheet, pivoting rows and columns interchangeably. To support this use case, we are pleased to introduce PIVOT and UNPIVOT operators in BigQuery. PIVOT creates columns from unique values in rows by aggregating values, and UNPIVOT reverses this action.The example below uses PIVOT on bigquery-public-data.usa_names.usa_1910_current to show the number of males and females born each year, representing each gender as a column. Then UNPIVOT reverses this action.

Language: SQL

  -- we start with SQL to create a simple table
-- we only include gender, year, and number. 
CREATE TABLE
  mydataset.sampletable1 AS (
  SELECT
    Gender,Year,SUM(Number) AS Number
  FROM
    `bigquery-public-data.usa_names.usa_1910_current`
  WHERE
    Year >= 2017
  GROUP BY
    Gender, Year);
-- The resulting table:
--+----------------------------------------+
--|   Gender   |    Year    |    Number    |
--+----------------------------------------+
--|      F     |    2019    |    1353716   |
--|      F     |    2017    |    1403989   |
--|      F     |    2018    |    1380382   |
--|      M     |    2018    |    1568678   |
--|      M     |    2019    |    1538056   |
--|      M     |    2017    |    1604609   |
--+----------------------------------------+
-- use PIVOT to create columns for “female” and “male” 
CREATE TABLE
  mydataset.Pivoted AS
SELECT
  year, male, female
FROM
  mydataset.sampletable1 
PIVOT( SUM(Number) FOR gender IN ('M' AS male,
  'F' AS female))
ORDER BY
  year;
-- The resulting pivoted table:
--+----------------------------------------+
--|    Year    |   female   |     male     |
--+----------------------------------------+
--|    2017    |   1403989   |    1604609  |
--|    2018    |   1380382   |    1568678  |
--|    2019    |   1353716   |    1538056  |
--+----------------------------------------+
-- UNPIVOT reverses the row/column rotation of PIVOT.
SELECT
  *
FROM
  mydataset.Pivoted 
UNPIVOT(number FOR gender IN (male AS 'M',
  female AS 'F'));

QUALIFY (Preview)

More advanced users of SQL know the power of analytic functions (aka window functions). These functions compute values over a group of rows, returning a single result for each row. For example, customers use analytic functions to compute a grand total, subtotal, moving average, rank, and more. With the announcement of support for QUALIFY, BigQuery users can now filter on the results of analytic functions by using the QUALIFY clause. 

QUALIFY belongs in the family of query clauses used for filtering along with WHERE and HAVING. The WHERE clause is used to filter individual rows in a query. The HAVING clause is used to filter aggregate rows in a result set after aggregate functions and GROUP BY clauses. The QUALIFY clause is used to filter results of analytic functions. 

To show the utility of QUALIFY, the example below uses QUALIFY to return the top 3 female names from each year in the last decade using from bigquery-public-data.usa_names.usa_1910_current. 

Language: SQL

  -- QUALIFY filters the result of the RANK function
SELECT
  name,year,SUM(number) AS total,
  RANK() OVER (PARTITION BY year 
  ORDER BY SUM(number) DESC) AS rank
FROM
  `bigquery-public-data.usa_names.usa_1910_current`
WHERE
  gender = 'F'
  AND YEAR >= 2010
GROUP BY 1,2 
QUALIFY RANK <= 3
ORDER BY 2,4;

Flexible Schema Handling

New SQL for administrators and data engineers enables table renaming for data pipeline processes, as well as flexible column management.

Table Rename (GA)

In data pipeline processes, tables are often created and then renamed so that they can make way for the next iteration of the pipeline run. To accomplish this, customers need a mechanism by which they can create a table and then subsequently rename it. Now if customers want to change this name using SQL, they can. Using the simple syntax that ALTER TABLE RENAME TO provides, customers will be able to rename a table after creation to clear the way for the next iteration of tables in the data pipeline.

Language: SQL

  -- create a sample table “tablename” in “mydataset”. 
-- You will rename this table.
CREATE OR REPLACE TABLE dataset.tablename(
    col1 STRING, 
    col2 NUMERIC);
-- if this table “tablename” becomes obsolete
-- perform Table Rename to “obsoletetable”
ALTER TABLE
  mydataset.name RENAME TO obsoletetable;

DROP NOT NULL constraints on a column (GA)

While BigQuery has historically provided many tools available in the UI, CLI and APIs, we know that many administrators prefer interfacing with the database using SQL. BigQuery recently released DDL statements which enable data administrators to provision and manage datasets and tables, greatly simplifying provisioning and management. Today, we continue the next addition in this line of releases by announcing ALTER COLUMN DROP NOT NULL constraint on a column:

• ALTER COLUMN DROP NOT NULL allows the administrator to remove the NOT NULL constraint from a column in BigQuery.

Language: SQL

  -- create a table to store credit card numbers
-- the business requires this field, so 
-- include a NOT NULL constraint 
CREATE TABLE
  mydataset.customers(credit_card_number STRING NOT NULL);
-- if needs of the business no longer require this field,
-- the customer can allow null entries in this column
-- by dropping the constraint
ALTER TABLE
  mydataset.customers 
ALTER COLUMN credit_card_number DROP NOT NULL;

CREATE VIEW with column list (GA)

Views are used ubiquitously by BigQuery customers to capture business logic. Oftentimes, BigQuery users have business requirements to assign aliases to columns in views. Now BigQuery supports doing so upon view creation in a column name list format with the release of CREATE VIEW with column list syntax.

Language: SQL

  -- aliases list1 and list2 can be assigned in a list format
CREATE VIEW
  myview (list1, list2) AS
SELECT
  column_1, column_2
FROM
  mydataset.exampletable

New Geospatial Tools

ST_POINTN, ST_STARTPOINT, and ST_ENDPOINT

Geospatial data is incredibly valuable to data analytics customers dealing with data from the physical world. BigQuery has very strong geospatial function support to help customers process marketing data, track storms, or manage self-driving cars. Particularly for analyzing vehicle or location tracking data, we’re thrilled to provide three new functions to allow users to easily extract or filter on key points:  

• ST_POINTN
• ST_STARTPOINT
• ST_ENDPOINT

For example, when working with vehicle histories,  ST_POINTN, ST_STARTPOINT, and ST_ENDPOINT allow users to extract elements such as the start and the end of a trip. For identifying origin-destination pairs these functions will make that task much easier.

Language: SQL

  -- pull the first, second, penultimate and final points 
-- from a linestring
WITH linestring as (
    SELECT ST_GeogFromText('linestring(1 1, 2 1, 3 2, 3 3)') g
)
SELECT
  ST_StartPoint(g) AS first, ST_EndPoint(g) AS last,
  ST_PointN(g,2) AS second, ST_PointN(g, -2) as second_to_last
FROM
  linestring
+--------------+--------------+--------------+----------------+
| first        | last         | second       | second_to_last |
+--------------+--------------+--------------+----------------+
| POINT(1 1)   | POINT(3 3)   | POINT(2 1)   | POINT(3 2)     |
+--------------+--------------+--------------+----------------+

As sure as a hot summer day pairs well with an ice-cold beverage, these new user-friendly SQL features in BigQuery pair well with your data analytics workflows. To learn more about BigQuery, visit our website, and get started immediately with the free BigQuery Sandbox.

Today we’re announcing the HarbourBridge Schema Assistant, which provides a guided schema-design workflow for migrating from MySQL or PostgreSQL to Spanner. HarbourBridge imports dump files (from mysqldump or pg_dump) or directly connects to your source database, and converts the source database schema to an equivalent Spanner schema. The new Schema Assistant capability displays the source schema and Spanner schema side-by-side, highlights errors and walks you through a series of steps to validate and optimize your Spanner schema. It also produces a browsable assessment report with an overall migration-fitness score for Spanner, a table-by-table detailed analysis of type mappings and a list of features used in the source database that aren’t supported by Spanner. It supports editing of table and column names, column types, primary keys and constraints, as well as dropping of tables, columns, foreign keys and secondary indexes.

The new Schema Assistant complements HarbourBridge’s existing data and schema migration capabilities and is a critical step towards our goal of building a complete open-source migration toolkit. HarbourBridge continues to support command-line schema and data migration and turn-key Spanner evaluation.

Complementing the bulk data migration capabilities of HarbourBridge, we are also announcing the ability to migrate change events from MySQL to Cloud Spanner.

Supported Features in Schema Assistant

1. Global type mapping. Users can customize the global mapping for how types should be mapped to Spanner consistently across the schema. For example, mapping large integers in source schema to Spanner’s NUMERIC.
2. Local type mapping. Users can override the custom type mapping for a given table/column.
3. Session management. A session keeps track of all the changes made to the schema mapping.
4. Customization of secondary indexes. Users can add, edit and delete secondary indexes to optimize their Spanner performance.
5. Customization of foreign keys and interleaved tables. Table interleaving is an important design consideration when migrating to Cloud Spanner as explained in more detail in this blog post.

Features in the pipeline

We are already working to further expand the supported set of schema editing features and welcome your feedback. We are particularly excited to expand the Schema Assistant’s design recommendations for optimizing Spanner schemas e.g. in-depth recommendations for primary key design.

HarbourBridge is open source and we gladly accept contributions from the wider community.

At Google, we believe that when it comes to solving a problem as big and urgent as climate change, we get more done when we collaborate. From beekeepers in Germany to urban foresters in Los Angeles, we support the work of nonprofits, scientists, and organizations that are working to mitigate the impact of climate change globally, and increase communities’ resilience to its effects.

To this end, we are proud to launch the Climate Innovation Challenge, which will provide Google Cloud research credits to advance a better understanding of climate resilience and promising solutions to address urgent climate challenges. I’m excited about this launch. We need to get smarter about the inevitable impact of our changing climate and how it will reshape our lives, supply chains, and business. Sustainability is a business-critical agenda, and we need intelligent technologies, leadership, and collaboration to drive industry transformations and reach a net-zero world.

The innovation and scale required to solve the toughest climate challenges will come from technology. At Google Cloud, we’re working across industries to increase climate resilience, applying cloud technology to help solve key challenges in the fight against climate change. Nonprofits, scientists, and organizations will be key in developing new research and innovations that will help us better understand how we can accelerate action on climate.

Through the new program, individual climate researchers in higher education and not-for-profit research organizations can apply for Google Cloud credit grants of up to $100,000 to accelerate their projects with Google’s state-of-the-art, data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) cloud services, from Google Earth Engine (EE) to Google Public Datasets like the one from the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). We will work with specialist partners in environmental organizations, agriculture, and carbon reduction to help evaluate proposals and select participants. Our first partner is the National Science Foundation (NSF) AI Institute for Research on Trustworthy AI in Weather, Climate, and Coastal Oceanography (AI2ES). Alongside the cloud credits, we will also provide researchers with access to technical training and mentoring, to help jumpstart their work.

From idea to insight to impact

In 2021, researchers at 500 universities in 47 countries received Google Cloud research credit grants. Others received funding through the Google Cloud Research Innovators Program, which promotes collaboration among a global cohort of scientists and provides them with professional opportunities and technical expertise. Here are some of the Research Innovators who have already advanced their climate research with Google Cloud:

• At CalTech Tapio Schneider and his team built Climate Machine, a next-generation open-source Earth System Model that will integrate more earth and atmospheric data than ever before.
• At UCLA, Bo Zhou uses EE for remote sensor modeling to help bureaus of land management make conservation decisions.
• At the University of New England, James Brinkhoff conducts spatial and temporal analysis for agriculture crop modeling and water use with data from EE.
• At Natural Resources Canada (NRCan), Richard Fernandes is developing the LEAF toolbox to map and assess vegetation with satellite data from EE.
• At the University of Toronto, Yuhong He uses EE to map changes occurring in natural and managed ecosystems systems using remote sensing, machine learning, and ecosystem modelings.
• At UCLA, Henry Houskeeper uses machine learning with EE’s satellite imagery to automate detection of kelp forests.
• At the University of Hawaii at Manoa, Jonghyun Lee conducts numerical modeling for water resources with Google Colab.
• At Technical University in Dublin, Santos Fernández Noguerol runs functions to collect weather data from governmental agencies, then automatically stores them in Google Cloud Storage buckets for future spatial analysis.
• At the University of Colorado at Denver, Farnoush Banaei-Kashani conducts data science projects with applications for Intelligent Transportation and Earth Sciences.

To apply for a Climate Innovation Challenge grant, click here and include “Climate Innovation Challenge” as the first line of your proposal. We will announce additional focus areas, partnerships, and recipients throughout the year. Click here to learn more about Google Cloud sustainability.

We opened our Sydney cloud region in 2017 and, since then, we have continued to invest and expand across Australia and New Zealand to support the digital future of organizations of all sizes. In Australia, Google Cloud supports almost A$3.2 billion in annual gross benefits to businesses and consumers. This includes A$686 million to businesses using Google Workspace and Google Cloud Platform, another A$698 million to Google Cloud partners, and A$1.8 billion to consumers.¹ 

For customers in Australia, New Zealand and across Asia Pacific, we’re excited to announce that our new Google Cloud region in Melbourne is now open. Designed to help businesses build highly available applications for their customers, the Melbourne region is our second Google Cloud region in Australia and 11th to open in Asia Pacific. 

We’re celebrating the occasion with a digital event where federal minister for the Digital Economy, Jane Hume, and customers Australia Post, Trade Me, Bendigo and Adelaide Bank, The Australian Football League and Macquarie Bank will share their perspectives. Come join us!

A global network of regions

Melbourne joins the existing 26 Google Cloud regions connected via our high-performance network, helping customers better serve their users and customers throughout the globe. With this our second region in Australia, customers benefit from improved business continuity planning with distributed, secure infrastructure needed to meet IT and business requirements for disaster recovery, all the while maintaining data sovereignty in-country.

With this new region, Google Cloud customers operating in Australia and New Zealand will benefit from low latency and high performance of their cloud-based workloads and data. Designed for high availability, the region opens with three zones to protect against service disruptions, and offers a portfolio of key products, including Compute Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Bigtable, Cloud Spanner, and BigQuery. 

We also continue to invest in expanding connectivity across the Australia and New Zealand region by working with partners to establish subsea cables and new Dedicated Cloud Interconnect locations and points of presence in major cities including Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, Canberra, Brisbane and Auckland.

Collectively, this will deliver geographically distributed and secure infrastructure to customers across Australia and New Zealand – which is especially important for those in regulated industries such as Financial Services and the Public Sector.  

What customers and partners are saying

Navigating this past year has been a challenge for companies as they grapple with changing customers demands and greater economic uncertainty. Technology has played a critical role, and we’ve been fortunate to partner with and serve people, companies, and government institutions around the world to help them adapt. The Google Cloud region in Melbourne will help our customers adapt to new requirements, new opportunities and new ways of working.  

“We moved to Google Cloud to improve the stability and resilience of our infrastructure and become more cloud-native as part of a digital transformation program that keeps the customer at the heart of our business. We welcome Google Cloud’s investment in ANZ and the opportunities the Google Cloud Melbourne region presents to improve Trade Me’s agility and performance. – Paolo Ragone, Chief Technology Officer, Trade Me     

“We initially turned to Google Cloud to help us process parcels faster and gain deeper insights into our business and its processes. The relationship has continued to deliver benefits to our customers and our organization and we welcome Google Cloud’s opening of the Melbourne region as presenting even more opportunities for businesses to innovate and generate efficiencies.” – Munro Farmer, Chief Information Officer, Australia Post.

“We are well progressed with our multi-year strategy to grow and transform our organization to be Australia’s bank of choice. Google Cloud’s advanced data capabilities and renowned culture of innovation are strongly aligned to this strategy and will allow us to become even more innovative and agile in responding to our customers’ ever-changing needs. We were quick to run our workloads out of the Melbourne cloud region and we believe Google Cloud’s expanded investment in local infrastructure will further assist us on our business transformation journey.” – Andrew Cresp, Chief Information Officer, Bendigo and Adelaide Bank.

“We have a clear vision when it comes to innovating to deliver world-class service to our customers, and our partnership with Google Cloud is core to that strategy. The company’s continued investments in local infrastructure and technology present new opportunities for us as we advance our transformation journey in this digital-first era.” – Chris Smith, Vice President, Digital Service, Optus

Our global ecosystem of channel partners has expanded by more than 400% in the last two years, and we look forward to continuing our close relationships with partners  in Australia and New Zealand as we help customers modernize, innovate, scale and grow.

“Australian companies are increasingly realising the benefits of their cloud investments and are now looking to transform their organisations at scale. We are excited about the potential and new value that the Google Melbourne Cloud region will bring to our clients as we continue to work together on delivering intelligent and innovative solutions to Australian organisations.” – Tara Brady, CEO of Accenture Australia and New Zealand

“Google Cloud has always been there for its customers for the long haul and the opening of the new Melbourne Cloud region is great news. This increased resilience and scale will empower companies of all sizes to be bold in accelerating their digital transformation plans.” – Tony Nicol,  CEO of Servian

“We’re excited about the launch of the Melbourne Cloud region. It will cater to the needs of industries we work closely with including healthcare and financial services, and will further enhance how we jointly deliver on the compliance, privacy and security requirements of companies as they advance their digital transformation.” – Simon Poulton, CEO of Kasna

“The opening of the new Google Cloud region in Melbourne is fantastic news as it now enables DXC customers access to enhanced services for their mission critical application and data solutions across two regions within Australia.  As our customers modernise their application estate, many are seeking dual region cloud services, and DXC is excited to partner with Google Cloud to deliver these services to customers in Australia and New Zealand.” – Tim Fraser, Google Practice Lead ANZ at DXC Technology

Helping customers build their transformation clouds

Google Cloud is here to support businesses, helping them get smarter with data, deploy faster, connect more easily with people and customers throughout the globe, and protect everything that matters to their businesses. The cloud region in Melbourne offers new technology and tools that can be a catalyst for this change.  Click here to learn more about all our Google Cloud locations.

^{1. AlphaBeta, The Economic Impact of Google Cloud to Australia, July 2021}