[SOLVED] is there any metadata store like 'hive metastore' in BigQuery?

is there any metadata store like 'hive metastore' in BigQuery?

I am new to BigQuery. I just want to know, whether do we have anything like hive metastore (metadata about all tables, columns and their description) in BigQuery?

Solution

BigQuery offers some special tables whose contents represent metadata, such as the list of tables and views in a dataset. The "meta-tables" are read-only. To access metadata about the tables and views in a dataset, use the __TABLES_SUMMARY__ meta-table in a query's SELECT statement. You can run the query using the BigQuery web UI, using the command-line tool's bq query command, or by calling the jobs.insert API method and configuring a query job.

Another more detailed meta-table is __TABLES__ - see example below

    SELECT table_id,
        DATE(TIMESTAMP_MILLIS(creation_time)) AS creation_date,
        DATE(TIMESTAMP_MILLIS(last_modified_time)) AS last_modified_date,
        row_count,
        size_bytes,
        CASE
            WHEN type = 1 THEN 'table'
            WHEN type = 2 THEN 'view'
            WHEN type = 3 THEN 'external'
            ELSE '?'
        END AS type,
        TIMESTAMP_MILLIS(creation_time) AS creation_time,
        TIMESTAMP_MILLIS(last_modified_time) AS last_modified_time,
        dataset_id,
        project_id
    FROM `project.dataset.__TABLES__`

for table schema - columns, description - you can utilize bq command line - for example:

bq show publicdata:samples.shakespeare

with result as

 tableId      Last modified                  Schema
 ------------- ----------------- ------------------------------------
 shakespeare   01 Sep 13:46:28   |- word: string (required)
                                 |- word_count: integer (required)
                                 |- corpus: string (required)
                                 |- corpus_date: integer (required)

see more at https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/bq-command-line-tool#gettable