Data Studio now allows more Join Possibilities when Blending Data

How Google makes Data Studio more independent from Data Sources

Until now, you could blend data in Data Studio only with a left outer join. But with a new update regarding data blending, you can now select from 5 different join operators [1]:

• Inner join
• Left outer join
• Right outer join
• Full outer join
• Cross join

See below the options in Join configuration:

When you want to blend data you can select different fields for each join configuration.

An update which, to be honest, was also necessary. Because other BI tools offer this possibility for ages now. Especially, if you work with different data sources, you may even be dependent on the blend function, since you can’t implement a comprehensive data preparation process, but instead merge the data in Data Studio. This makes Data Studio more attractive for customers who do not rely exclusively on Google internal services such as BigQuery.

So for me, this update was one, which makes sense in any case and was also overdue. Again, a piece in the direction of the big BI tools like Qlik and Tableau. Together with the update that you now have, the possibility to use optional client authentication in MySQL and PostgreSQL connectors can be regarded as a positive week in the Data Studio cosmos. It remains to be seen what Google will surprise us with next.

Sources and Further Readings

[1] Google, Release Notes (2022)