If you’ve ever wanted to get a statistic about Stack Overflow or your favorite Stack Exchange site, you may have used our Stack Exchange Data Explorer, aka SEDE. (This is separate from our regular "data dumps" meant for researchers and others who want to work with large chunks of the content.) Launched in 2010, SEDE is a web tool you can use to share, query, and analyze the data from our network. It’s updated weekly with all our latest changes and additions, minus a few sensitive things like people’s email addresses and voting behavior. We’ve seen a lot of creative uses of SEDE, from finding out “What questions does Jon Skeet have a higher/lower score on than me?” to “Where have I 'met' another user?” and many other questions keeping the community up at night. Today, we’re thrilled to expand your ability to play with this data by working with Google and releasing it (with regular updates) on BigQuery. Anyone with a Google Cloud Platform account can use SQL queries or their favorite tool to sort, join, and analyze away. What makes BigQuery different from SEDE?
- Go beyond 50,000 rows (our SEDE limit). BigQuery lets you go big.
- Unlike SEDE, BigQuery comes with a REST API. You can connect all sorts of tools like Tableau, re:dash, Looker, R, and pandas to it.
- JOIN all the things: BigQuery hosts a wide variety of datasets from GitHub’s to NOAA’s weather data. You can make all sorts of useful or useless but entertaining queries across these.
Go check out our dataset now and poke at it. Feel free to share your results on reddit.com/r/bigquery. You can also check out the data scientists job listings to put your creative queries to work.