Analytics vendors are providing their users with more and more ways to manipulate data in a bid to stand out from the competition. Last week saw Alphabet Inc. join the fray by rolling out a new time-based partitioning feature for BigQuery, its hosted data warehousing service, that makes it possible to run a query only against information from specified dates.

An analyst that wants to examine their firm’s most recent quarterly sales metrics, for instance, could utilize the functionality to avoid the delay of scanning their entire financial database. And the request can be narrowed down even further using subqueries, another new feature that was added to BigQuery last week. It’s part a revamped SQL implementation that Alphabet describes as much more powerful than the syntax customers had to employ before to interact with their information.

Microsoft Corp., one of the search giant’s top rivals, is promising to provide similar benefits with the new version of its relational store that became generally available last week. SQL Server 2016 introduces native integration with R, a statistical programming language for creating machine learning and business intelligence algorithms. Redmond claims that the addition makes it possible to carry out certain number-crunching tasks up to 100 times faster than before.

SQL Server 2016 launched against the backdrop of a startup called Verto Analytics Inc. raising $16.1 million in funding to speed up another key analytic activity: Mapping out customer behavior. Its namesake service tracks web activity across desktops, mobile devices and apps to assemble what is described as a complete picture of consumer usage trends. Brands can use the data to customize their marketing campaigns based on the platform-specific preferences of the audiences they wish to target.

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