Question

A retail analytics team wants to enrich their sales data with demographic and weather information to understand regional buying patterns. They do not want to source, license, and load this external data themselves, and they want to join it directly with their existing tables using SQL. Which Google Cloud capability best meets this need?

Accepted Answer

Use BigQuery public datasets, which provide ready-to-query external data that can be joined with the team's own tables using standard SQL

Answer

Store the sales data in a Cloud Storage data lake and manually download demographic files for each analysis

Answer

Deploy a Dataproc cluster to run Spark jobs that scrape public weather websites nightly

Answer

Use Firestore to cache demographic lookups for low-latency mobile access