Sharing a dataset with another team or company without copying it

Analytics Hub is a BigQuery data sharing platform that lets organizations publish and subscribe to datasets as secure, managed exchanges without copying or moving data. It is the recommended approach when you need to share large-scale analytics data with external partners, other business units, or the public while retaining control over access and usage. Use it instead of ad hoc BigQuery dataset sharing whenever governance, scalability, or monetization of data sharing is a requirement.

1 · Learn the must-know

• 1Analytics Hub uses a publisher/subscriber model where publishers create 'listings' inside a 'data exchange' and subscribers link to them, gaining query access without the data being copied or duplicated.
• 2Because subscribers query a linked dataset directly against the publisher's underlying BigQuery storage, data stays fresh in real time and publishers only pay for storage while subscribers pay for their own query compute.
• 3Choose Analytics Hub over manually granting IAM roles on BigQuery datasets when sharing with many external or cross-organization consumers, since it centralizes discovery, access management, and revocation at scale.
• 4Data exchanges and listings support fine-grained access control, letting publishers control who can discover and subscribe to specific listings, including private exchanges for internal-only sharing.
• 5Analytics Hub is appropriate for sharing BigQuery-native and BigQuery-compatible data (including some public/commercial datasets) but is not a general-purpose file or object sharing mechanism like Cloud Storage.
• 6Subscribers cannot modify the source data through the linked dataset, since it remains read-only and governed by the publisher, making it well-suited for controlled, one-to-many analytics distribution.

2 · Check your understanding