How Do I Get Started With Big Query?

Overview

There are three main ways you interact with BigQuery:

• Loading and exporting data
• Querying and viewing data
• Managing data

To perform these interactions, you can use:

• The BigQuery web UI in the GCP Console
• The BigQuery classic web UI
• The BigQuery command-line tool
• The BigQuery REST API or client libraries

Loading and exporting data

In most cases, you load data into BigQuery storage. If you want to get the data back out of BigQuery, you canexport the data.

Alternatively, you can set up a table as an external data source, which allows you to query data stored outside of BigQuery.

Querying and viewing data

After you load your data into BigQuery, you can query or view the data in your tables. For example, you can perform the following tasks:

• Run interactive queries
• Run batch queries
• Create a view, which is a virtual table defined by a SQL query
• Use partitioned tables to query a subset of your data

Managing data

In addition to querying and viewing data, you can manage data in BigQuery in the following ways:

• Listing projects, jobs, datasets, and tables
• Getting information about jobs, datasets, and tables
• Defining, updating, or patching datasets and tables
• Deleting datasets and tables
• Managing table partitions

Next steps

• For more information on using the BigQuery web UI, see Using the BigQuery web UI.
• For more information on using the CLI, see Using the bq command-line tool.
• To learn more about accessing BigQuery programmatically, see the REST API reference or the BigQuery client libraries page.

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