Release Notes

December 22, 2016

November 30, 2016

Announced publication of two new tutorials:

• Visualizing BigQuery Data Using Google Data Studio 360
• Visualizing BigQuery Data Using Google Cloud Datalab

November 7, 2016

November 2, 2016

November 1, 2016

September 29, 2016

August 26, 2016

August 1, 2016

July 27, 2016

June 2, 2016

May 6, 2016

March 23, 2016

• Announced availability of BigQuery Public Datasets.
• Announced Long Term Storage pricing.
• Added support for Avro source format for load operations and as an federated data source in the BigQuery API or command-line tool.
• Added support for CSV and JSON schema auto-detection for federated data sources in the BigQuery API or command-line tool.
• Added support for the BYTES data type.
• Updated the interface for creating tables in the BigQuery web UI.

December 15, 2015

• Added Custom quotas, which allow you to set project-wide billing alerts that help prevent runaway costs.
• Added Query explain, which shows, stage by stage, how BigQuery executes your queries.
• Added improvements to the Streaming API:
  • You can use the Streaming API in EU locations.
  • You can use Template tables to manage related tables used for streaming.
  • No more warm-up delay. You can now query your data within a few seconds of the first streaming insertion.
• Added support for analyzing Google Cloud Audit logs that enable you to track usage and access.

August 25, 2015

• Added support for user-defined functions (UDFs).
• Added the ability to query CSV and JSON data directly from Google Cloud Storage. For more information, see federated data sources.
• Added ability to cancel a job
• Pricing updates:
  • Introduced BigQuery Slots, which lets you guarantee resources, regardless of demand on the overall multi-tenant pool.
  • Introduced query pricing tiers.
• Quota updates:
  • Increased the concurrent rate limit to 50 queries.
  • Increased the daily query limit to 100,000 queries.
• BigQuery web UI improvements:
  • Tables named with a date suffix (for example, when using the TABLE_DATE_RANGE function) display as a collapsed item in the navigation panel.
  • User-defined function (UDF) support.
  • A new "Format Query" button.
• Added streaming buffer statistics for tables that are being actively modified by streaming inserts. These statistics offer better information about table size and availability for copy/extract, and they can also help with debugging.

April 16, 2015

• Added ability to load data from Google Cloud Datastore.
• Increased the API requests per second, per user quota from 10 to 100 requests per second.
• Query reference updates:
  • Added COALESCE.
  • Added GROUP_CONCAT_UNQUOTED.
  • Added support for RIGHT OUTER JOIN and FULL OUTER JOIN.
  • Added ROLLUP and GROUPING modifiers.
• Added ability to undelete a table using table decorators.

March 25, 2014

• Added views. A view is a virtual table defined by a SQL query.
• Added JSON functions.
• Added table wildcard functions, for a cost-effective way to query data from a specific set of tables.
• Improved JOIN support by adding CROSS JOIN and multiple JOIN functionality. For more information, see joins.
• Increased quota limits for streaming data into BigQuery.
• Added a description property for datasets, tables and fields.
• Updated the concurrent rate limit and export request quota in the quota policy.
• Added parallel export capability.
• Changed the pricing model, lowering rates and adding reserved capacity pricing.
• Updated batch query functionality. Batch queries no longer have a 30 minute execution delay. Instead, batch jobs now begin as soon as idle resources are available. If the job hasn't started within 3 hours, the job priority changes to interactive.

Sept 18, 2013

• Added support for streaming inserts.
• Added table decorators for time-based table snapshots.
• Added new aggregate functions.

June 11, 2013

• Added window functions.
• Added support for package-based pricing.
• Added query caching.
• Updated quota policies.
• Added support for returning large query results.

March 14, 2013

• Added TIMESTAMP data type functionality.
• Added GROUP EACH BY functionality for aggregations of more distributed values.
• Added JOIN EACH functionality for joining tables of any size.
• Added ability to add columns to table schema after the data is already loaded into BigQuery. To add columns to a table schema, pass the new schema to the schema parameter of Tables.update().

October 1st, 2012

API

• New support for importing JSON files and nested and repeated fields
• New quota limits

August 28th, 2012

API

• New batch queries feature allows for queries to be executed between 30 minutes to 3 hours later, but are charged at a lower cost than interactive queries which execute immediately

New tool release: BigQuery Connector for Excel now allows you to make queries to Google BigQuery from Microsft Excel!

August 17th, 2012

API

• CSV chunking - when importing, you can now specify the allowQuotedNewlines flag to be FALSE in the bq command-line tool, or in the API, and the import will be chunked, or processed in parallel. If you have quoted new lines in your data, be sure to set this flag to be TRUE.
• Deletion of large tables has been fixed
• Improved validation of project IDs

July 16th, 2012

BigQuery Browser Tool

• Added syntax highlighting
• Add a drag handle to the separator below the query editor
• Fixed some keyboard shortcuts in the query editor
• New favicon

API

• Project owners can now call bigquery.jobs.get for jobs created by other users

May 30th, 2012

API

• Introduced new quota enforcement schema. User can now have one (1) large query and one (1) pipeline job (import, export, streaming, etc.) concurrently.
• Added support for leading underscores in field name
• Improved error handling
• Added token based pagination support for list operations
  • Clients can use token based pagination to page through a single table snapshot. Subsequent changes to the table are not reflected when paging through list results.
• Improved list operations for tables and datasets

May 11, 2012

API

• Table expiration time is now exposed
• Better errors for field/rows being too long
• Custom delimiters added

April 20, 2012

BigQuery Browser Tool

• New welcome page and more helpful messages when there aren't any queries or jobs to display

API

• Clearer quota error messages
• Copy jobs are now atomic

April 13, 2012

BigQuery Browser Tool

• Add retries for connection errors
• Table view: Field names in schemas are left-aligned
• Table view: Removed "Actions" menu (use the nav panel instead)
• Table view: Added "Query Table" menu, which prefills query builder with a table query
• Query builder has simpler prefill logic and a better help bubble

API

• Remove bigquery.jobs.delete

April 5, 2012

BigQuery Browser Tool

• 10MB limit to uploads done through the BigQuery browser tool
• Bug fix for zero row results

API

• API Discovery docs have typed configuration
• Bug fix limiting the amount of data returned in a TableData.List
• Atomic updates of tables for all import jobs
• Join behavior tightened (no outer join, only left most table can be large)

March 9, 2012

BigQuery Browser Tool

• Pressing the tab key in the query box now adds a tab instead of tabbing to the next UI element
• Pressing the enter key in the query box now preserves leading whitespace to the next lines
• Pressing the enter key no longer starts a query but will always add a newline to the box, and CTRL+ENTER runs the query
• Navigation panel no longer forgets scroll location and submenu state when jobs are running
• BigQuery browser tool now has a new URL at http://bigquery.cloud.google.com; it is still possible to access the browser tool using the old URL

March 1, 2012

BigQuery Browser Tool

• Faster BigQuery browser tool load time
• "Max invalid records" support in the BigQuery browser tool

API

• Enable support for VARIANCE, STDDEV, and AVG aggregate functions
• Add job.kind to Jobs:list API response
• Better error messages for quota-related errors

February 2012

BigQuery Browser Tool

• 'Show previous query results' option in the query panel
• The current project view is now highlighted
• "Refresh" option in the the projects drop-down menu

API

• Support for loading gzip compressed files from Google Cloud Storage
• Error handling
  • Faster detection of unreadable files
  • Improvements in handline multibyte UTF-8 characters

November 2011

BigQuery Browser Tool

• The Web UI now allows JSON schema format to be used in the "Create Table" dialog

  This is useful in situations where developers may want to use the same schema format for API calls, the bq command-line client, and the Web UI.

API

• The default configuration.load.createDisposition for load jobs is now CREATE_IF_NEEDED
• "load" jobs now allow users to specify a number of rows to skip
  • This is useful for skipping header rows or other metadata that is not parseable when you import CSV files.
  • This value applies to all files in the source list.
• BigQuery can now load data from files that contain delimiters other than the comma
  • Delimiters may be any character expressable as a single Latin-1 byte other than ", \n, and \r.
  • Example (using the bq command line tool): bq load --field_delimiter=: newtable gs://bucket/input.txt

October 2011

BigQuery V2 Release

• A new REST API
• A new web user interface
• Support for JOIN statements
• Ability to export a table or query result to a CSV file in Google Cloud Storage
• Support for ACLs on groups of tables (datasets)
• A new object architecture describing tables, groups of tables, and queries