Google Cloud BigQuery Storage is a component of Google Cloud’s data analytics platform called BigQuery. It is designed to provide fast and efficient storage for large datasets used in BigQuery.

Traditionally, BigQuery stored data in a columnar format on Google’s distributed file system. However, with the introduction of BigQuery Storage, it now offers an additional storage option optimized for analytical workloads.

BigQuery Storage is built on the Capacitor columnar storage format, which provides benefits such as improved query performance, faster data ingestion, and reduced storage costs. It allows for efficient columnar data access and parallel processing, enabling faster data scans and query execution.

With BigQuery Storage, data can be directly read and written using the storage API, which is particularly useful for scenarios where you need to stream or bulk load data into BigQuery. It also offers features like predicate pushdown and column pruning, which help optimize query performance by reducing the amount of data that needs to be read from storage.

Additionally, BigQuery Storage integrates with other Google Cloud services, such as Dataflow and Dataproc, allowing you to easily leverage these services for data processing and transformation tasks.

Overall, BigQuery Storage enhances the performance and efficiency of data storage and retrieval in BigQuery, enabling faster and more cost-effective analytics processing on large datasets.