Google launches BigQuery Transfer Service for Azure

You can now easily transfer data from Azure Blob Storage into BigQuery

With BigLake, Google is already offering a solution to do cloud independent data analysis. Now, Google introduces more and more services to migrate your data and your Data Warehouse.

The BigQuery Data Transfer Service can now transfer data from Azure Blob Storage into BigQuery[1]. Like already said, Google already offers Google BigLake to query data on Azure or AWS, but now Google also wants more and more customers and users to migrate their data to the Google Cloud. They have already started offering Migration Assessments for Snowflake and Apache Data Warehouse so that customers and users can plan a migration to Google BigQuery.

Google attacks Snowflake with BigQuery Migration Assessment

How Snowflake Users can now easily switch to the Google Data Warehouse

medium.com

It seems that Google is now also starting to offer the needed services to migrate your data more easily in this case for Azure Blob Storage. So that you can now easily use the Data Transfer service to transfer your data to the Google Cloud.

How new Updates make Google BigQuery a real Superior of Traditional Data Warehouses

New Feature makes BigQuery a real hybrid Data Lakehouse

medium.com

The BigQuery Data Transfer Service for Azure Blob Storage lets you easily and automatically schedule and manage recurring load jobs from Blob Storage into BigQuery. So you don’t need a third party tool or code but you can do everything by yourself. The service currently supports loading data from Blob Storage in formats like CSV, JSON, Avro & Co[2].

In the BigQuery UI, you will find the service in the left panel under “Data transfer” when the configuration window will show up and you can create a Data Transfer from Azure by just filling out the following form:

Be aware that of course the other side (the Azure cloud) also needs to allow the Google Cloud service to connect to it. The detailed documentation for this can be found linked below.

So again, interesting news for all BigQuery users and customers. Google clearly tries to strenghten its strategy to offer a cloud-independent data analysis service with BigLake and BigQuery and focus on winning new customers by offering easy Data Warehouse migration services.

Sources and Further Readings

[1] Google, BigQuery release notes (2023)

[2] Google, Introduction to Blob Storage transfers (2023)