Over the years, vast amounts of satellite data have been collected and ever more granular data are being collected everyday. Until recently, those data have been an untapped asset in the commercial space. This is largely because the tools required for large scale analysis of this type of data were not readily available and neither was the satellite imagery itself. Thanks to Earth Engine, a planetary-scale platform for Earth science data & analysis, that is no longer the case.

Google Earth Engine (GEE) is a groundbreaking product that has been available for research and government use for more than a decade. Google Cloud recently launched GEE to General Availability for commercial use. This blog post describes a method to utilize GEE from within BigQuery’s SQL allowing SQL speakers to get access to and value from the vast troves of data available within Earth Engine.

Migrating data to the cloud can be a daunting task. Especially moving data from warehouses and legacy environments requires a systematic approach. These migrations usually need manual effort and can be error-prone. They are complex and involve several steps such as planning, system setup, query translation, schema analysis, data movement, validation, and performance optimization.

This blog post will provide guidance to administrators currently using or interested in using Kafka nodes to maintain cluster changes as they scale up or down to balance performance and cloud costs in production deployments. Kafka brokers contained within host groups enable the administrators to more easily add and remove nodes. This creates flexibility to handle real-time data feed volumes as they fluctuate.

Tell us if this sounds familiar. You’ve found an awesome data set that you think will allow you to train a machine learning (ML) model that will accomplish the project goals; the only problem is the data is too big to fit in the compute environment that you’re using. In the day and age of “big data,” most might think this issue is trivial, but like anything in the world of data science things are hardly ever as straightforward as they seem.

Every organization wants to identify the right sales leads at the right time to optimize conversions. Lead scoring is a popular method for ranking prospects through an assessment of perceived value and sales-readiness. Scores are used to determine the order in which high-value leads are contacted, thus ensuring the best use of a salesperson’s time. Of course, lead scoring is only as good as the information supplied.