Determining JSON types in BigQuery

Senior Data Engineer • Contractor / Freelancer • GCP & AWS Certified
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Senior Data Engineer • Contractor / Freelancer • GCP & AWS Certified
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Working with JSON in BigQuery — the native JSON datatype, extracting and transforming JSON data, LAX conversion functions, and handling semi-structured payloads.
So if you're looking to decompress after a long week and relax, check out the LAX conversion functions for handling JSON conversions in BigQuery. There are 4 separate functions: LAX_STRING, LAX_BOOL, LAX_FLOAT64, LAX_INT64 - with each one of them att...
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Here's a mildly interesting function if you're working with JSON in BigQuery.
JSON_TYPE takes in a JSON value and returns the name of the respective JSON type (object, array, string, number, boolean, null) as a STRING.
See below an illustration of it in action.
Also, given we use the native JSON datatype, notice how we can just access the first ([0]) element in an ARRAY or a field directly by dot notation.
This you cannot do with a JSON-like STRING (not without parsing). Check out my previous post about JSON vs JSON-like string.
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