google-bigquery

getting the description of a table using Google bigquery

I am new to bigquery. First thing, I would have liked to do the SQL equivalent of DESC using Google bigquery. I did:

DESC `paj.dw.MY_TABLE`;

But I get:

Statement not supported: DescribeStatement

There are mentions of INFORMATION_SCHEMA in beta version, but I get:

Syntax error: Unexpected identifier "INFORMATION_SCHEMA"

How do you do it yourself ? Thank you.

Solution

  • Take first table in public dataset for example:

    SELECT column_name, is_nullable, data_type
FROM `bigquery-public-data.austin_311.INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS`
WHERE table_name="311_request"

    You get:

    +--------------------------+-------------+-----------+
|       column_name        | is_nullable | data_type |
+--------------------------+-------------+-----------+
| unique_key               | YES         | STRING    |
| complaint_type           | YES         | STRING    |
| complaint_description    | YES         | STRING    |
| owning_department        | YES         | STRING    |
| source                   | YES         | STRING    |
| status                   | YES         | STRING    |
| status_change_date       | YES         | TIMESTAMP |
| created_date             | YES         | TIMESTAMP |
| last_update_date         | YES         | TIMESTAMP |
| close_date               | YES         | TIMESTAMP |
| incident_address         | YES         | STRING    |
| street_number            | YES         | STRING    |
| street_name              | YES         | STRING    |
| city                     | YES         | STRING    |
| incident_zip             | YES         | INT64     |
| county                   | YES         | STRING    |
| state_plane_x_coordinate | YES         | STRING    |
| state_plane_y_coordinate | YES         | FLOAT64   |
| latitude                 | YES         | FLOAT64   |
| longitude                | YES         | FLOAT64   |
| location                 | YES         | STRING    |
| council_district_code    | YES         | INT64     |
| map_page                 | YES         | STRING    |
| map_tile                 | YES         | STRING    |
+--------------------------+-------------+-----------+