Using GROUP BY ALL 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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Featured in other database systems, the GROUP BY ALL has been announced in preview for BigQuery as well.
This will allow us to not enumerate all the non-aggregated columns when performing aggregates.
It's definitely better than GROUP BY 1,2,3 which would fail once we'd change the list of columns we'd like to group by. Overall, I find it a useful shorthand when exploring or debugging.
Here's an example of how it looks.
SELECT country, sell_date, SUM(sales) AS total_sales
FROM input_data
-- new
GROUP BY ALL
-- instead of
-- GROUP BY country, sell_date

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