[adrianmsmith]

BigQuery is an amazing product and there are good reasons to use it.

One place I worked at had a table with 100 billion rows. And some other tables as well. If a manager asked for an ad-hoc query, it was 5 minutes of writing a SQL query including JOINs (which didn't need to worry about which fields were indexed etc. e.g. you could write WHERE then a regex), and $15 and 5 minutes later I'd have the answer. Apparently 100s of VMs were started and stopped to answer that query, but it all happened automatically, at very low cost.