Google BigQuery Analytics

Chapter 5Talking to the BigQuery API

The last chapter described the principal abstractions used by BigQuery: projects, datasets, tables, and jobs. This chapter shows you how those concepts map into interaction with the BigQuery service. We introduce the BigQuery REST API by describing the raw underlying HTTP format. We show that there is no magic involved: The BigQuery service is just a server that accepts HTTP requests and returns JSON responses. After reading this chapter, you should understand the API model and be able to interact with the service.

If you do not plan to write code to access BigQuery—that is, you plan to use only tools such as bq or the BigQuery web interface to use BigQuery—you may want to skip this chapter. That said, understanding how the BigQuery API works may make your interaction with BigQuery tools make more sense because those tools use the BigQuery API underneath the covers.

Introduction to Google APIs

Google has a number of externally facing APIs for accessing Google products: the Maps API, a Google+ API, several AdSense APIs, and more. You can see a list of them all in the Google Cloud Console. (Go to https://console.developers.google.com. click the name of a project, then click the APIs & auth tab.) BigQuery is just one of these APIs and shares a lot in common with other Google web services.

This section gives information about the basics of accessing any of the REST-based Google web APIs, with a focus on how these operations work in BigQuery. ...