Fulcrum vs BigQuery
Side-by-side trajectory, velocity, and editorial themes.
Field-data captures grow a BI layer while mobile coasts on fixes.
Fulcrum continues steady weekly shipping across web, iOS, and Android, but the substance is concentrated on the web. Recent releases add a freehand lasso selection on maps, a Power BI connector, and time-aware Insights (Beta) queries. Mobile cadence is dominated by single-issue stability fixes rather than new capabilities.
The product is widening from pure field-data capture into the analyze-and-share layer above it. Web work is going into bulk-action ergonomics, BI tooling integration, and growing the Insights surface. Mobile platforms are tracking a maintenance pattern, with versioned releases shipping one or two narrow fixes at a time and no new user-facing capabilities.
Expect Insights to gain depth toward general availability, with more BI-side integrations and richer bulk operations on web selections. Mobile is unlikely to see significant new capabilities in the next cycle.
BigQuery doubles down on Iceberg, graph, and global data sharing as the lakehouse fight intensifies.
BigQuery's May 2026 ship list is dominated by three tracks: open-format lakehouse integration (Iceberg v3 with deletion vectors, REST catalog support in Conversational Analytics), graph capabilities maturing inside BigQuery Studio, and global data exchange via multi-region sharing listings reaching GA. Alongside the feature work, Google is tightening Data Transfer Service security (MFA on Google Ads transfers) and warning about Ads retention changes that will cap historical backfills from June 1. The release notes show a mature warehouse continuing to absorb adjacent workloads rather than reinventing itself.
BigQuery is positioning itself as the federated query and sharing fabric for a multi-format world, with Iceberg getting closer to first-class status and Conversational Analytics extending across external catalogs. The graph and notebook work signals a push to keep more analytical work inside Studio instead of bouncing to specialized tools. Expect continued layering of governance, AI-assisted query, and open-table support on top of the existing engine rather than core engine reinvention.
Next obvious step is GA for Iceberg v3 features and full conversational graph querying without Preview gating. Watch for additional first-party data sources getting MFA mandates, mirroring the Google Ads tightening.
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