NEON Data Access via BigQuery: A Pilot Project

NEON is exploring opportunities to make data available via cloud providers. This includes Google Cloud Platform, in association with the move of NEON data storage to Google Cloud Storage. In the fall of 2022, NEON loaded two tabular data products to Google's BigQuery environment, as a pilot project to explore data access and interaction through BigQuery.

Try out BigQuery

To demonstrate BigQuery data access, we developed a Jupyter notebook that queries both the pilot datasets and brings them together for a simple analysis. You can run this notebook in the Google Colab environment here.

If you prefer to use a different Jupyter environment, you can also access the notebook directly here, and run it in the environment of your choice. In this case, consult the list of code libraries loaded in the first and second code chunks, and make sure you have them installed.

Tips for success

• Section 1 of the notebook contains setup instructions. These are critical! You will need a Google Cloud account, and you will need to link the NEON datasets to a project in your account. The notebook will guide you through these steps.

• Do not simply open the notebook and run all! Some of the setup steps need to be carried out in Google Cloud, and three of the code chunks require you to enter your project ID.

Future directions

Stay tuned for further developments in NEON's cloud compute support. This is an ongoing effort!