Google launches Cloud Dataprep in public beta to help companies clean their data before analysis

At its Google Cloud Next conference in San Francisco back in March, Google unveiled Cloud Dataprep, a service that lets companies clean their structured and unstructured datasets for analysis in, for example, Google's BigQuery, or even for use in training machine learning models. Over the past six months, Cloud Dataprep has been in private beta, but Google is now officially graduating the service to public beta for anyone to use. Some reports indicate that analysts and data scientists can spend up to 80 percent of their time cleaning and preparing raw data for analysis. This is where Dataprep comes into play, as it can automatically detect data type, schema, and even where there is mismatched or missing data. A key facet of Dataprep is the visual layout, which makes it easier for people who aren't data engineers to alter or add to their datasets.