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GitHub on BigQuery: Analyze all the code

Wednesday, June 29, 2016



Google, in collaboration with GitHub, is releasing an incredible new open dataset on Google BigQuery. So far you've been able to monitor and analyze GitHub's pulse since 2011 (thanks GitHub Archive project!) and today we're adding the perfect complement to this. What could you do if you had access to analyze all the open source software in the world, with just one SQL command?

The Google BigQuery Public Datasets program now offers a full snapshot of the content of more than 2.8 million open source GitHub repositories in BigQuery. Thanks to our new collaboration with GitHub, you'll have access to analyze the source code of almost 2 billion files with a simple (or complex) SQL query. This will open the doors to all kinds of new insights and advances that we're just beginning to envision.

For example, let's say you're the author of a popular open source library. Now you'll be able to find every open source project on GitHub that's using it. Even more, you'll be able to guide the future of your project by analyzing how it's being used, and improve your APIs based on what your users are actually doing with it.

On the security side, we've seen how the most popular open source projects benefit from having multiple eyes and hands working on them. This visibility helps projects get hardened and buggy code cleaned up. What if you could search for errors with similar patterns in every other open source project? Would you notify their authors and send them pull requests? Well, now you can. Some concepts to keep in mind while working with BigQuery and the GitHub contents dataset:
To learn more, read GitHub's announcement and try some sample queries. Share your queries and findings in our reddit.com/r/bigquery and Hacker News posts. The ideas are endless, and I'll start collecting tips and links to other articles on this post on Medium.

Stay curious!
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