Retail businesses understand the value of demand forecasting—using their intuition, product and market experience, and seasonal patterns and cycles to plan for future demand. Beyond the need for forecasts that are as accurate as possible, modern retailers also face the challenge of being able to perform demand planning at scale.

Businesses increasingly gather data to better understand their customers, products, marketing, and more. But unlocking valuable and meaningful insights from that data requires powerful, reliable, and scalable solutions. We hear from our BigQuery and Looker customers that they’ve been able to modernize business intelligence (BI) and allow self-service discovery on the data the business collects.

Data analysts can spend hours writing SQL each day to get the right insights. So it’s crucial that the tools in the Google Cloud Console make that job as easy and as fast as possible. Now, we’re excited to show you how BigQuery’s Cloud Console UI has been updated with radical usability improvements for more efficient work, making it easier to find the data you need and write the right SQL quickly.

BigQuery offers the ability to quickly import a CSV file, both from the web user interface and from the command line: Indeed, try to open this file up with BigQuery: and we get the errors like: This is because a row is spread across multiple lines, and so the starting quote on one line is never closed. This is not an easy problem to solve — lots of tools struggle with CSV files that have new lines inside cells. Google Sheets, on the other hand, has a much better CSV import mechanism.