Series

BigQuery Performance

Practical guides to making BigQuery queries faster and cheaper — partitioning, clustering, search indexes, time travel, cost optimization, and query tuning strategies.

BigQuery BigLake Tables Explained: What They Are and When to Use Them
Query your data lake with warehouse-grade security and performance — without moving a single file.
Apr 26, 20264 min read165
Extended data type support for BigQuery search indexes
So, a couple of months ago, I posted about BigQuery search indexes, interesting to those who work with large volumes of STRING or JSON data. Recently, I came across a blog post introducing, in preview, the indexing of INT64 and TIMESTAMP columns as w...
Nov 13, 20241 min read35
Why partitioning tables is not a silver bullet for BigQuery performance
I recently encountered an interesting case that reminded me of a couple of things and taught me a few lessons. When working with BigQuery tables, partitioning and clustering are often go-to operations. Typically, we would partition by a meaningful da...
Oct 15, 20242 min read294
Ingestion-time partitioning in BigQuery
Have you ever used ingestion-time partitioning in BigQuery? It's a separate type of partitioning that distributes rows into partitions based on the time they land in BQ. Once such a table is defined, you can query the pseudocolumns PARTITIONDATE and ...
Jul 4, 20241 min read167
The PARTITIONS view in INFORMATION_SCHEMA
Riding on the back of recent news that BigQuery table partition limit has just increased from 4k to 10k partitions, I wanted to talk a bit about the PARTITIONS view in INFORMATION_SCHEMA. I've previously posted about information schema views, but thi...
Jun 8, 20241 min read78
Search Indexes in BigQuery
Here's something that might be interesting if you analyze large volumes of STRING or JSON data in BigQuery. Let's look at SEARCH indexes and what you need to know to get started. So, what are they used for? You have a big table (>10 GB) with STRING o...
Apr 6, 20242 min read491

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