Using the bq CLI utility with BigQuery

UpdatedMarch 2, 2026

•1 min read

Using the bq CLI utility with BigQuery

Constantin Lungu

Senior Data Engineer • Contractor / Freelancer • GCP & AWS Certified

Part of seriesPractical SQL

Remember that in additional to the Cloud Console GUI or client libraries, you can also perform BigQuery tasks using the bq command-line interface.

It's included with the gcloud SDK and once you have logged in, you can perform a number of operations such as:
- run queries against BQ
- create, copy and delete tables
- load data into tables
- view IAM policies for a BQ asset and much more

How I've used it until now:
- impersonate service accounts
- perform operations that are/were not supported in the SQL interface, such as copying partitions between tables

Any other interesting ways you're using the bq cli tool?

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