BigQuery is Google Cloud's serverless data warehouse and analytics platform. Users run SQL or Python on structured and unstructured data without managing infrastructure. It supports streaming ingestion, BigQuery ML, federated queries, open table formats such as Apache Iceberg, governance features such as lineage and data quality, and assistance from Gemini. Storage and compute are separate. Access is through the Google Cloud console, the bq command-line tool, APIs and ODBC or JDBC drivers.
BigQuery is a product of Google LLC, headquartered in Mountain View, California, and a subsidiary of Alphabet. The service is proprietary. You set a dataset's location when you create it: the EU multi-region, where data is stored in Belgium or the Netherlands, a single region such as Frankfurt, Paris, Milan or Warsaw, or the US multi-region. Data is stored in the chosen location. Because Google is a US company, the service falls under US jurisdiction, including the CLOUD Act, even when an EU location is used.