Google BigQuery

Authentification

Dataform will connect to BigQuery using a service account. You’ll need to create a service account from your Google Cloud Console and assign it permissions to access BigQuery.

1. Follow these instructions to create a new service account in Google Cloud Console.
2. Grant the new account the BigQuery Admin role. (Admin access is required by Dataform so that it can create queries and list tables.) Read this if you need help.
3. Create a key for your new service account (in JSON format). You will upload this file to Dataform. Read this if you need help.

Configuration options

Setting table partitions

BigQuery specific options can be applied to tables using the bigquery configuration parameter.

BigQuery supports partitioned tables. These can be useful when you have data spread across many different dates but usually query the table on only a small range of dates. In these circumstances, partitioning will increase query performance and reduce cost.

BigQuery partitions can be configured in Dataform using the partitionBy option:

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config {
  type: "table",
  bigquery: {
    partitionBy: "DATE(ts)"
  }
}
SELECT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP() AS ts

This query compiles to the following statement which takes advantage of BigQuery's DDL to configure partitioning:

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CREATE OR REPLACE TABLE dataform.example
PARTITION BY DATE(ts)
AS (SELECT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP() AS ts)

Cluster partitions

If desired, partitions can be clustered by using the clusterBy option, for example:

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config {
  type: "table",
  bigquery: {
    partitionBy: "DATE(ts)",
    clusterBy: ["name", "revenue"]
  }
}
SELECT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP() as ts, name, revenue

Configuring access to Google Sheets

In order to be able to query Google Sheets tables via BigQuery, you'll need to share the sheet with the service account that is used by Dataform.

• Find the email address of the service account through which you connected to Dataform. You can find this on the Google Cloud IAM service accounts console page. If you're developing your Dataform project locally (as opposed to using Dataform Web), you can find the service accounts email in the .df-credentials.json file.
• Share the Google sheet with the email address of the service account as you would a colleague, through the sheets sharing settings and make sure it has access.

Using BigQuery labels

BigQuery labels are key-value pairs that help you organize your Google Cloud BigQuery resources. To use them in Dataform, add them to the config block:

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config {
  type: "table",
  bigquery: {
    labels: {
      label1: "val1",
      /* If the label name contains special characters, e.g. hyphens, then quote its name. */
      "label-2": "val2"
    }
  }
}

select "test" as column1

Using different project_ids within the same project

You can both read from and publish to two separate GCP project_ids within a single Dataform project. For example, you may have a project_id called raw that contains raw data loaded in your warehouse and a project_id called analytics in which you create data tables you use for analytics and reporting.

Your default project id is defined in the defaultDatabase field in your dataform.json file.

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{
  "warehouse": "bigquery",
  "defaultSchema": "dataform",
  "assertionSchema": "dataform_assertions",
  "defaultDatabase": "analytics"
}

You can then override the default gcp project id in the database field in the config block of your SQLX files

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config {
  type: "table",
  database: “raw”
}

Using separate project-ids for development and production

You can configure separate project-ids for development and production in your environment.json file. The process is described on this page.

Optimizing partitioned incremental tables for BigQuery

When creating incremental tables from partitioned tables in BigQuery, some extra care needs to be taken to avoid full table scans, as BigQuery can't optimize where statements that are computed from inline select statements. To work around this, values used in the where clause should be moved to a pre_operations block and saved into a variable using BigQuery scripting.

Here's a simple incremental example for BigQuery that follows this pattern, where the source table raw_events is already partitioned by event_timestamp .

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config {
  type: "incremental",
}

pre_operations {
  declare event_timestamp_checkpoint default (
    ${when(incremental(),
    `select max(event_timestamp) from ${self()}`,
    `select timestamp("2000-01-01")`)}
  );
}

select
  *
from
  ${ref("raw_events")}
where event_timestamp > event_timestamp_checkpoint

This will avoid a full table scan on the raw_events table when inserting new rows, only looking at the most recent partitions it needs to.

Managing BigQuery policy tags

If you use policy tags for managing column-level security in BigQuery, then you can set policy tags on columns in tables via the Dataform config block. Note that any policy tags created directly in BigQuery will get overwritten when Dataform updates the table, so make sure that you configure all policy tags within Dataform.

Here's an example of setting a policy tag on a column. The full tag identifier must be used as in the example below. This can be easily copied to your clipboard from the taxonomies and tags page inside the Google Catalog.

my_table.sqlx
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config {
  type: "table",
  columns: {
    column1: {
      description: "Some description",
      bigqueryPolicyTags: ["projects/dataform-integration-tests/locations/us/taxonomies/800183280162998443/policyTags/494923997126550963"]
    }
  }
}

select "test" as column1

Dataform web features for BigQuery

Real time query validation

Dataform validates the compiled script you are editing against BigQuery in real time. It will let you know if the query is valid (or won’t run) before having to run it.

Bytes processed

Dataform displays Bytes processed and Bytes billed for every run you do in Dataform in the run logs page. You can then estimate the cost of those queries by multiplying the bytes billed by your company price per Byte.

Sample Dataform project with BigQuery

We prepared the following sample project using the Stackoverflow public dataset.

View project page

Packages

BigQuery Audit Logs

We published a package that helps the analysis of BigQuery usage logs. You can find more information by reading the related blog post or the package page.

Visit the package page Read the blog post

Blog posts

We published the following blog post specifically for BigQuery users.

Sending data from BigQuery to Intercom using Google Cloud Functions

The blog post offers a walkthrough to use Google Cloud Functions to push data from tables and views in BigQuery to third party services like Intercom.

Read the article on the blog

Building an end to end Machine Learning Pipeline in Bigquery

The blog post offers a walkthrough to build a simple end to end Machine Learning pipeline using BigQueryML in Dataform.

Read the article on the blog

Getting help

If you are using Dataform web and are having trouble connecting to BigQuery, please reach out to us by using the intercom messenger icon at the bottom right of the app.

If you have other questions related to BigQuery, you can join our slack community and ask question on the #bigquery channel.

Join dataform-users on slack

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