Datawise
Practical SQL

BigQuery Saves Your Query Results — Here's How to Find Them

Constantin LunguUpdated 1 min read

Ever run a heavy BigQuery SQL query, processed gigabytes of data — and then accidentally closed the tab or forgot to save the results? 😬

Don't re-run it. Your results are still there.

BigQuery automatically saves query results to an anonymous temporary table for 24 hours. You can find it under Job Information → Temporary Table.

This is also the engine behind BigQuery's caching behavior: if you run the exact same query again within that window — with no changes — BigQuery serves results directly from cache, at no charge.

One caveat worth knowing: if your result set exceeds 10 GB (that's the output, not the data scanned), it won't be cached. So for very large result sets, you'll want to write results to a permanent table explicitly.

BigQuery console screenshot: a GROUP BY ALL query on learning_us.trends_us_prod lists Destination table as Temporary table under Job information, and an arrow leads to querying that anonymous _a85a60... dataset table, which processes 0 B and returns the same dma_name results.