Use Google Cloud BigQuery as Data Source in Power BI
BigQuery is Google’s serverless data warehouse in Google Cloud. Power BI can consume data from various sources including RDBMS, NoSQL, Could, Services, etc. It is also easy to get data from BigQuery in Power BI.
In this article, I am going to demonstrate how to connect to BigQuery to create visuals.
Prerequisites
Google Cloud account is required. You can register a trial account.
In BigQuery, there is a public dataset named world_bank_intl_debt in project bigquery-public-data. We are going to use table international_debt to create some visual.
The details about this table is available here: https://bigquery.cloud.google.com/table/bigquery-public-data:world_bank_intl_debt.international_debt?pli=1&tab=details
Cost of querying public data sets
Public data sets are paid by Google for storage but you need to pay for querying it.
Connect to BigQuery in Power BI
Open Power BI and create a new file.
In the Home tab and click Get Data button.
In the Database tab of the opened window, select “Google BigQuery”.
Click Connect button to continue.
Click Sign in button to sign into your Google Could account.
In the opened window, click Allow button to allow Power BI Desktop to view and manage your data in Google BigQuery:
Click connect button once signed in to continue.
Select the Required Data Tables
The hierarchy of BigQuery is: Project -> DataSet -> Table.
In the opened window Navigator, expand bigquery-public-data project.
For this tutorial, we just need international_debt table under world_bank_intl_debt dataset.
Click Load button to load the data.
And then you can setup Connection settings. In this case, let’s choose Import which will bring a copy of the data into Power BI.
Please note you will pay for querying the data. There are 1,359,644 records in this table. You can customize the query to only retrieve sample data to reduce the cost.
Once imported, the following fields are available to use:
Create a visual using the data imported
With the data available, we can now easily create a line chart by using field year as Axis and field value as Values.
You can create as many visuals as you can do with any other data sources.
Summary
It is very easy to consume Google BigQuery data in Power BI. You can create joins when drafting the queries or implement within Power BI.
For performance and cost consideration, you may choose to physicalise some data in BigQuery and then query the aggregated data into Power BI.
Hi,
I tried to login google big query and successfully connected. But I want to remove my sign in info and account from google big query. Please suggest how to remove that.
Hi Padma,
This is a good question.
Once you authorize Power BI to access Big Query data, you can follow the steps below to remove it:
- Go to your Google Account.
- On the left navigation panel, select Security.
- On the Signing in to other sites panel, select Signing in with Google (https://myaccount.google.com/permissions).
- Select the site or app you want to remove. For this case, it's Power BI Desktop
- Select Remove Access.
If you are trying to remove account access to BigQuery, you can use IAM feature in Google Cloud Console.
I hope that answers your question. Let me know if you have other questions.
Hi Raymond,
Thank you so much for your prompt reply, it helped me to remove access. We can change the password too..
But I am trying to remove account from that third party app. Unfortunately, there is no option to "Remove account" option. It still showing my account in that like this. It will be a great help if we find a way to remove account..
Thank you
Padma
Hmm my understanding is that once you click Remove Access button that account will be gone when you next time try to connect to BigQuery from Power BI Desktop. At least that works for me. That one will only shows up there because you have not removed it from 'Apps with access to your account page': https://myaccount.google.com/permissions.
Better to raise this to Google support if it doesn't resolve the problem.
Hi,
Thank you for your post.
Do you know how to customize de query in power query?
Couldn't find it in any documentation.
Thanks.
Joana Barbosa
Hello,
I'm not sure whether I understand your questions correctly or not. Once your import the data using Import or Direct Query, you can then customise through Power Query Editor in Power BI:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-query/power-query-quickstart-using-power-bi
Yes, it's not working for me even though i deleted from third part apps. At least we can restrict the access. Thank you so much for your help..