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5 tips for building a better dashboard with Google Data Studio and BigQuery
… or 5 tricks to ease the pain and do things better
If you are in data analytics this article is for you.
Google Data Studio is f̶u̶l̶l̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶b̶u̶g̶s̶ a free tool to build custom reports and visualise your data (which Google claims is beautiful). My data is not so beautiful. I would say building dashboards with it is a struggle. And this post is about how to build you reports quicker with no sudden surprises like the one you can see at the top.
Yup :) This was my first BigQuery invoice. I’ve managed to claim it back but it still soars…
So if you want to do things more efficiently with no sudden surprises just have a look at these tips below.
1. Use better partitioning
Do it first. Define partitions just before you load your data into BigQuery. It saves time and money later.
See that magic number of £3002.72 ? Yeah, that happens when you do a SELECT * FROM big table. Don’t do it. Use partitioning.
By default BigQuery will partition your table by Ingestion time. Read more in Google docs about it. However, often your load jobs contain data with different timestamp, for example, from yesterday.
