Better Integration of Google BigQuery and Data Studio

How to keep your Data Fresh

When providing data via report or dashboard, data should be as up-to date as possible. If you are working with BigQuery as a Data Warehouse or Data Lakehouse solution, my first choice is Google Data Studio as a BI layer. It is free, easy to use and of course very well integrated with Big Query.

What was still in need of improvement were the settings for refreshing data sources in Data Studio. Google is now following suit with the BigQuery data source. As of today, you can use more intervals here:

You can customize the data refresh rate for BigQuery data sources. Custom refresh lets you choose from increments of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 40, 50 minutes, and from 1 to 12 hours. — Google [2]

What may appear to be a marginal update can cause quite a bit of operational problems. For example, if data sources follow different update cycles and you as a department are dependent on them, this can of course be an exclusion criterion for data studio. That’s why I find the new features in Data Studio once again very helpful. At the same time, the heat map graphic element was added (Read here more about it). So for me both are pretty useful new features what Google has released this week.

Let’s see what will be improved and added next to Data Studio I’m curious!

Sources and Further Readings

[1] Google Cloud, Open data lakehouse on Google Cloud (2021)

[2] Google, Release Notes (2022)