Introduction to BigQuery INFORMATION_SCHEMA

Beta

This product or feature is in a pre-release state and might change or have limited support. For more information, see Product launch stages.

INFORMATION_SCHEMA is a series of views that provide access to metadata about datasets, tables, and views.

INFORMATION_SCHEMA pricing

For projects that use on-demand pricing, queries against INFORMATION_SCHEMA views incur a minimum of 10 MB of data processing charges, even if the bytes processed by the query are less than 10 MB. 10 MB is the minimum billing amount for on-demand queries. For more information, see On-demand pricing.

Because INFORMATION_SCHEMA queries are not cached, you are charged each time you run an INFORMATION_SCHEMA query, even if the query text is the same each time you run it.

You are not charged storage fees for the INFORMATION_SCHEMA views.

Limitations

BigQuery INFORMATION_SCHEMA is subject to the following limitations:

• BigQuery INFORMATION_SCHEMA queries must be in standard SQL syntax. INFORMATION_SCHEMA does not support legacy SQL.
• INFORMATION_SCHEMA query results are not cached.
• Currently, INFORMATION_SCHEMA cannot be used to retrieve metadata on partitions in partitioned tables.
• Currently, INFORMATION_SCHEMA views cannot be used in DDL statements.

Required permissions

Retrieving metadata by using INFORMATION_SCHEMA queries requires no special permissions. The results returned by querying INFORMATION_SCHEMA views are filtered based on the IAM permissions required to get metadata about each resource.

Next steps

• Learn how to use INFORMATION_SCHEMA to get dataset metadata.
• Learn how to use INFORMATION_SCHEMA to get table metadata.
• Learn how to use INFORMATION_SCHEMA to get view metadata.