BigQuery is used by organizations of all sizes, and to meet the diverse needs of our users, BigQuery offers highly flexible pricing options. For enterprise customers, BigQuery’s flat-rate billing model is predictable and gives businesses direct control over cost and performance. We’re now making the flat-rate billing model even more accessible by lowering the minimum size to 100 slots, so you can get started faster and quicker.

When migrating a data warehouse to BigQuery, one of the most critical tasks is mapping existing user permissions to equivalent Google Cloud Identity and Access Management (Cloud IAM) permissions and roles. This is especially true for migrating from large enterprise data warehouses like Teradata to BigQuery. The existing Teradata databases commonly contain multiple user-defined roles that combine access permissions and capture common data access patterns.

Today, we are introducing BigQuery Omni, a flexible, multi-cloud analytics solution that lets you cost-effectively access and securely analyze data across Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Azure (coming soon), without leaving the familiar BigQuery user interface (UI). Using standard SQL and the same BigQuery APIs our customers love, you will be able to break down data silos and gain critical business insights from a single pane of glass.

Today, we’re announcing Data QnA, a natural language interface for analytics on BigQuery data, now in private alpha. Data QnA helps enable your business users to get answers to their analytical queries through natural language questions, without burdening business intelligence (BI) teams. This means that a business user like a sales manager can simply ask a question on their company’s dataset, and get results back that same way.

At Google Cloud, we work with organizations performing large-scale research projects. There are a few solutions we recommend to do this type of work, so that researchers can focus on what they do best—power novel treatments, personalized medicine, and advancements in pharmaceuticals.

We hear from our users in the scientific community that having the right technology foundation is essential. The ability to very quickly create entire clusters of genomics processing, where billing can be stopped once you have the results you need, is a powerful tool. It empowers the scientific community to spend more time doing their research and less time fighting for on-prem cluster time and configuring software.

Editor’s note: We’re hearing today from Unity Technologies, which offers a development platform for gaming, architecture, film and other industries. Here, Director of Engineering and Data Sampsa Jaatinen shares valuable insights for modern technology decision makers, whatever industry they’re in.