Google Cloud has announced a preview of global queries for BigQuery, enabling SQL queries across data stored in multiple geographic regions without ETL pipelines or data movement. BigQuery automatically identifies query parts that must run in different regions, executes them locally, transfers only the results to the primary query location, and combines everything. Developers must explicitly opt in by configuring `enable_global_queries_execution` and `enable_global_queries_data_access` flags. The feature comes with higher latency than single-region queries, additional costs (compute per subquery, cross-region data transfer, and 8-hour storage of copied data), and compliance considerations since data physically crosses regional boundaries. AWS Redshift and Athena offer similar cross-region querying but without the same automatic distributed execution coordination.
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