Quickstart using the bq command-line tool

This page explains how to use the bq command-line tool to run queries and load data.

Before you begin

Before you begin this quickstart, use the Google Cloud Console to create or select a project and install the Cloud SDK.

Sign in to your Google Account.
If you don't already have one, sign up for a new account.
In the Cloud Console, on the project selector page, select or create a Cloud project.

Note: If you don't plan to keep the resources that you create in this procedure, create a project instead of selecting an existing project. After you finish these steps, you can delete the project, removing all resources associated with the project.

Go to the project selector page
Install and initialize the Cloud SDK.
BigQuery is automatically enabled in new projects. To activate BigQuery in a preexisting project, go to Enable the BigQuery API.
Enable the API
BigQuery provides a sandbox if you do not want to provide a credit card or enable billing for your project. The steps in this topic work for a project whether or not your project has billing enabled. If you optionally want to enable billing, see Learn how to enable billing.

Examine a table

BigQuery offers several sample tables that you can query. In this quickstart, you run some queries against the shakespeare table, which contains an entry for every word in every Shakespeare play.

To examine the schema of a specific table, run the following command. If the project and dataset IDs are the default values for your bq tool, you can omit the project and dataset IDs.

bq show PROJECT_ID:DATASET_ID.TABLE_ID

The following example examines the shakespeare table in the samples dataset:

bq show bigquery-public-data:samples.shakespeare

Output:

Table bigquery-public-data:samples.shakespeare

   Last modified                  Schema                 Total Rows   Total Bytes   Expiration
 ----------------- ------------------------------------ ------------ ------------- ------------
  26 Aug 14:43:49   |- word: string (required)           164656       6432064
                    |- word_count: integer (required)
                    |- corpus: string (required)
                    |- corpus_date: integer (required)

Run the help command

Use bq help to get detailed information about the bq command-line tool.

bq help

Include a command name to get information about a specific command. For example, the following call to bq help retrieves information about the query command.

bq help query

Run a query

Run a query to see how many times the substring raisin appears in Shakespeare's works.

To run a query, run the command bq query "SQL_STATEMENT".

Escape any quotation marks inside the SQL_STATEMENT with a \ mark, or
Use a different quotation mark type than the surrounding marks (" versus ').

The following standard SQL query does a word count for the number of times that the substring raisin appears in all of Shakespeare's works.

bq query --use_legacy_sql=false \
'SELECT
   word,
   SUM(word_count) AS count
 FROM
   `bigquery-public-data`.samples.shakespeare
 WHERE
   word LIKE "%raisin%"
 GROUP BY
   word'

Output:

Waiting on job_dcda37c0bbed4c669b04dfd567859b90 ... (0s) Current status:
DONE
+---------------+-------+
|     word      | count |
+---------------+-------+
| Praising      |   4   |
| raising       |   5   |
| raisins       |   1   |
| praising      |   8   |
| dispraising   |   2   |
| dispraisingly |   1   |
+---------------+-------+

If you search for a word that isn't in Shakespeare's works, no results are returned. For example, the following search for huzzah returns no matches.

bq query --use_legacy_sql=false \
'SELECT
   word
 FROM
   `bigquery-public-data`.samples.shakespeare
 WHERE
   word = "huzzah"'

Output:

Waiting on job_e19 ... (4s) Current status: DONE
$

Create a new table

Now create your own table. Every table is stored inside a dataset. A dataset is a group of resources such as tables and views.

Step 1: Download the sample data

The sample data contains approximately 7 MB of data about popular baby names, and it is provided by the US Social Security Administration.

Download the baby names zip file
Extract the file.

The zip file contains a read me file that describes the dataset schema. Learn more about the dataset.
Open the file named yob2010.txt to see what it looks like. The file is a CSV file with the following three columns: name, sex (M or F), and number of children with that name. The file has no header row.
Copy or move the yob2010.txt file into the directory you are using to run commands with the bq command-line tool.

Step 2: Create a new dataset

Use the bq ls command to see whether your default project has any existing datasets.
```
bq ls
```
Sample output:
```
  datasetId
 -------------
  olddataset
```
Run bq ls again to list the datasets in a specific project by including the project ID followed by a colon (:). The following example lists the datasets in the publicdata project.
```
bq ls publicdata:
```
Output:
```
  datasetId
 -----------
  samples
```
Use the bq mk command to create a new dataset named babynames in your default project. A dataset name can be up to 1,024 characters long, and consist of A-Z, a-z, 0-9, and the underscore, but it cannot start with a number or underscore, or have spaces.
```
bq mk babynames
```
Sample output:
```
Dataset 'myprojectid:babynames' successfully created.
```
Run bq ls to confirm that the dataset now appears as part of the default project:
```
bq ls
```
Sample output:
```
  datasetId
 -------------
  olddataset
  babynames
```

Step 3: Upload the table

The bq load command creates or updates a table and loads data in a single step.

Run the bq load command to load your source file into a new table called names2010 in the babynames dataset you created. By default, this command runs synchronously and takes a few seconds to complete.
```
bq load babynames.names2010 yob2010.txt name:string,gender:string,count:integer
```
The bq load command arguments:
- datasetID: babynames
- tableID: names2010
- source: yob2010.txt: if necessary, include the full path to the file
- schema: name:string,gender:string,count:integer
Sample output:
```
Waiting on job_4f0c0878f6184119abfdae05f5194e65 ... (35s) Current status: DONE
```

Run bq ls to confirm that the table now appears in the dataset:

bq ls babynames

Output:

   tableId    Type
 ----------- -------
  names2010   TABLE

Run bq show to see the schema:

bq show babynames.names2010

Output:

Table myprojectid:babynames.names2010

   Last modified         Schema         Total Rows   Total Bytes   Expiration
 ----------------- ------------------- ------------ ------------- ------------
  13 Mar 15:31:00   |- name: string     34041        653855
                    |- gender: string
                    |- count: integer

By default, when you load data, BigQuery expects UTF-8 encoded data. If you have data in ISO-8859-1 (or Latin-1) encoding and you're having problems with it, tell BigQuery to treat your data as Latin-1 using the -E flag. For more information, see Encoding.

Step 4: Run queries

Run the following command to return the most popular girls' names:

bq query "SELECT name,count FROM babynames.names2010 WHERE gender = 'F' ORDER BY count DESC LIMIT 5"

Output:

Waiting on job_58c0f5ca52764ef1902eba611b71c651 ... (0s) Current status: DONE
+----------+-------+
|   name   | COUNT |
+----------+-------+
| Isabella | 22731 |
| Sophia   | 20477 |
| Emma     | 17179 |
| Olivia   | 16860 |
| Ava      | 15300 |
+----------+-------+

Run the following command to see the most unusual boys' names. The minimum count is 5 because the source data omits names with fewer than 5 occurrences.

bq query "SELECT name,count FROM babynames.names2010 WHERE gender = 'M' ORDER BY count ASC LIMIT 5"

Output:

Waiting on job_556ba2e5aad340a7b2818c3e3280b7a3 ... (1s) Current status: DONE
+----------+-------+
|   name   | COUNT |
+----------+-------+
| Aarian   |     5 |
| Aaidan   |     5 |
| Aamarion |     5 |
| Aadhavan |     5 |
| Aaqib    |     5 |
+----------+-------+

Clean up

To avoid incurring charges to your Google Cloud account for the resources used in this quickstart, follow these steps.

Run the bq rm command to remove the babynames dataset. Use the -r flag to delete all tables in the dataset, include the names2010 table.
```
bq rm -r babynames
```
Confirm the delete command by typing y.

What's next

To learn more about the bq command-line tool, see Using the bq command-line tool.
To learn more about loading data into BigQuery, see Introduction to loading data.
To learn more about querying data, see Overview of querying BigQuery data.
To learn how to export data out of BigQuery, see Exporting table data.
To learn more about accessing BigQuery programmatically, see the REST API reference or the BigQuery API client libraries page.