Enable the BigQuery sandbox

The BigQuery sandbox lets you explore BigQuery capabilities at no cost to confirm whether BigQuery fits your needs. The sandbox lets you experience BigQuery and the Google Cloud console without providing a credit card, creating a billing account, or enabling billing for your project.

The Google Cloud console is the graphical interface that you can use to create and manage BigQuery resources and to run SQL queries. If you want to learn how to create a BigQuery table and query the table data by using the Google Cloud console, see Load and query data with the Google Cloud console.

Get started with the sandbox

The BigQuery sandbox is available to anyone with a Google Account. If you are a Firebase user, see Link BigQuery to Firebase in the Firebase Help for instructions on linking Firebase to BigQuery.

To open the sandbox, follow these steps:

In the Google Cloud console, open the BigQuery page.

Go to BigQuery

You can also open BigQuery in the Google Cloud console by entering the following URL in your browser:
```
https://console.cloud.google.com/bigquery
```
Authenticate with your Google Account, or create one if you haven't already.
If you agree to the terms of service, accept them.
Follow the prompts to create a Google Cloud project. To use the BigQuery sandbox, you must create a Cloud project.
After you create a Cloud project, the Google Cloud console displays the sandbox banner:

While you're using the sandbox, you do not need to create a billing account, and you do not need to attach a billing account to the project.

About the sandbox

This section explains the limitations of using the BigQuery sandbox, upgrading from the sandbox, and troubleshooting sandbox errors.

Limitations

The BigQuery sandbox is subject to the following limits:

All BigQuery quotas and limits apply.
You are granted the same free usage limits as BigQuery's free tier: 10 GB of active storage and 1 TB of processed query data each month.
You can create up to 1 GB of BigQuery BI Engine capacity. For more information, see What is BigQuery BI Engine?
All BigQuery datasets, the containers of BigQuery tables, have a default table expiration time and a default partition expiration set to 60 days. Any tables, views, or partitions in partitioned tables automatically expire after 60 days.
BigQuery sandbox projects do not support the following:

To remove the sandbox limits, you can upgrade your project and then remove or update the expiration time for your resources. After you upgrade from the sandbox, you can still use the free tier, but you can generate charges. To manage BigQuery quotas, consider setting up cost controls.

Upgrade from the sandbox

To upgrade from the BigQuery sandbox, follow these steps:

Enable billing for your project.
Update your BigQuery resources:
1. Remove or update the dataset's default table expiration.
2. Remove or update the dataset's default partition expiration.
3. Remove or update the expiration time for your tables.
4. Remove or update the expiration time for your views.
5. Remove or update the expiration time for your table partitions.

Troubleshoot

If your tables have expired, you can recover them within 48 hours. For more information, see Restoring a deleted table.

You can also view information about your BigQuery sandbox resources by using the audit logs. Audit logs show details such as whether a resource was created using the sandbox and when resources automatically expired.

What's next

To learn how to query public datasets, see Query a public dataset with the Google Cloud console.
To learn how to create a dataset and query tables in the Google Cloud console, see Load and query data with the Google Cloud console.
To get started with Firebase, see the Firebase landing page.
For updates on the BigQuery sandbox, see the release notes.
For details on BigQuery pricing, see the pricing page.
For details on BigQuery limits, see Quotas limits.
For more information about the free tier or about signing up for a $300 credit, see the Google Cloud free tier page.