BigQuery

Google BigQuery is a data warehouse platform. 

 Schema 

 You can define table schemas via JSON documents which get ingested at the same time as your data using the bq tool. 

 Data Types 

 Data Types List from google documentation 

 

 

 

 Name 

 Data type 

 Description 

 

 

 

 

 Integer 

 INT64 

 Numeric values without fractional components 

 

 

 Floating point 

 FLOAT64 

 Approximate numeric values with fractional components 

 

 

 Numeric 

 NUMERIC 

 Exact numeric values with fractional components 

 

 

 BigNumeric 

 BIGNUMERIC 

 Exact numeric values with fractional components 

 

 

 Boolean 

 BOOL 

 TRUE or FALSE (case-insensitive) 

 

 

 String 

 STRING 

 Variable-length character (Unicode) data 

 

 

 Bytes 

 BYTES 

 Variable-length binary data 

 

 

 Date 

 DATE 

 A logical calendar date 

 

 

 Date/Time 

 DATETIME 

 A year, month, day, hour, minute, second, and subsecond 

 

 

 Time 

 TIME 

 A time, independent of a specific date 

 

 

 Timestamp 

 TIMESTAMP 

 An absolute point in time, with microsecond precision 

 

 

 Struct (Record) 

 STRUCT 

 Container of ordered fields each with a type (required) and field name (optional) 

 

 

 Geography 

 GEOGRAPHY 

 A pointset on the Earth's surface (a set of points, lines and polygons on the WGS84 reference spheroid, with geodesic edges) 

 

 

 JSON 

 JSON 

 Represents JSON, a lightweight data-interchange format 

 

 

 

   

 Differences between JSON and Record/Struct 

 JSON type allows you to ingest JSON without pre-defining the schema whereas a record/struct must be pre-defined and all the fields must be known in advance. 

 JSON fields are more fiddly to query and work with in general. It seems like you can't do things like UNNEST them. 

   

   

   

 Nested/Repeated Columns 

 To allow a column (or object) to repeat (e.g. to have an array of values) you must use mode: NESTED in your schema. 

 See Nested and repeated columns documentation