BigQuery Hack: How to Quickly Populate a Table Without INSERT()

Reader Note: Before we begin, I have to warn you that the following is not considered to be a best SQL practice and is certainly not a textbook case of data engineering.

It’s, at best, a quick trick that will be most effective when you need to create a bit of test data from scratch when time is of the essence. Replicate at your own discretion.

Setting a Destination Table with Query Settings

BigQuery’s SQL workspace has some powerful, often-overlooked features that can help optimize your query jobs and make the tedious process of writing SQL scripts a bit more pleasant.

From providing insight into whether your query will run or not to providing support for JSON data types, BigQuery has a feature that accommodates almost every data engineering use case.

For this walkthrough, we’ll be concentrating on BigQuery’s query settings.

Just like you may not be familiar with every setting nestled in the system preferences app on your laptop (I’m a Mac person, can’t you tell?), or the settings app on your phone, I’d be willing to bet you’re not intimately familiar with BigQuery’s query settings.

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