Get column timestamp when they got added in Bigquery - google-bigquery

Question

I'm trying to find which all new columns got added to the table. Is there any way to find it? I was thinking to get all columns for a table with timestamps when they got created or modified so that I can filter which are new columns.
With INFORMATION_SCHEMA.SCHEMATA I get only table creation and modified date but not for columns.
With INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS I am able to get all column names and it's information but no details about its modified or creation timestamp.
My table doesn't have a snapshot so I can't compare it with the previous version to get changes.
Is there any way to capture this?

Answer 1

According to the BigQuery columns documentation, this is not metadata currently capture by BigQuery.
A possible solution would be to go into the BigQuery logs to see when and how tables were updated. Source control over the schemas and scripts that create these tables could also give you insight into how and when columns may have been added.

Answer 2

As #RileyRunnoe mentioned, this kind of metadata is not captured by BQ and a possible solution is go dig into the Audit Logs. Prior to doing this, you should have created a BQ sink that points to the dataset. See creating a sink for more details.
When the sink is created, all operations to be executed will store data usage logs in table cloudaudit_googleapis_com_data_access_YYYYMMDD and activity logs in table cloudaudit_googleapis_com_activity_YYYYMMDD under the BigQuery dataset you selected in your sink. Keep in mind that you can only track the usage starting at the date when you set up the logs export tables.
The query below has a CTE that queries from cloudaudit_googleapis_com_data_access_* since this logs the data changes and only gets completed jobs hence filtering for jobservice.jobcompleted. Query the CTE to get queries that contain "COLUMN" and don't include queries that don't have a destination table like the query we are about to run.
WITH CTE AS (
SELECT
protopayload_auditlog.methodName,
protopayload_auditlog.servicedata_v1_bigquery.jobCompletedEvent.job.jobConfiguration.query.query as query,
protopayload_auditlog.servicedata_v1_bigquery.jobCompletedEvent.job.jobStatus.state as status,
protopayload_auditlog.servicedata_v1_bigquery.jobCompletedEvent.job.jobConfiguration.query.destinationTable.datasetId as dataset,
protopayload_auditlog.servicedata_v1_bigquery.jobCompletedEvent.job.jobConfiguration.query.destinationTable.tableId as table,
timestamp
FROM `my-project.dataset_name.cloudaudit_googleapis_com_data_access_*`
WHERE protopayload_auditlog.methodName = 'jobservice.jobcompleted'
)
SELECT query,
REGEXP_EXTRACT(query,r'ADD COLUMN (\w+) \w+') as column,
table,
timestamp,
status
FROM CTE
WHERE query like '%COLUMN%'
AND NOT REGEXP_CONTAINS(dataset, r'^_')
ORDER BY timestamp DESC
Result: