Analyze terabytes of data with just a click of a button

That's interesting, you are the only one in this thread who is using it.

Could you tell a bit more about for what kind of analytics you are using it ? And why you use BigQuery and not some other analytics solution (Mixpanel, Kontagent, Flurry etc.) for these scenarios ?

I needed to do something like this and I ended up settling on a custom workflow connected through zeromq dumping data into into sharded sqlite databases. Single process handled writing to each database and lots of reads were mapped out and then reduced (also via zmq). This handled around 14 billion rows when I left that job. If you want to talk some more about it, my gmail is the same as my username.

Have you looked at hyperdex?

One company I know of literally ships hard drives-it's faster and more reliable than transferring the data over the internet. I'm not sure if that's what they do with BigQuery.

Wired.

How would Google offer you this service if they didn't "collect" your data?

Well it won't be publicly searchable unless you decide to share it. One of the features is user-based access permissions.

You need to read the contract/terms of service to determine what you are granting them with regards to your data. You might find that they want to keep an option open that you can't accept. You might also find that you are okay with what they propse. This is one of those times when you actually need to read the fine print.

Isn't Amazon S3 now running with a 5 terabyte limit now[1]? But still, shipping drives is far more sane than cross the t'interwebs for things of that size.

[1] http://aws.amazon.com/s3/faqs/#How_much_data_can_I_store