getting the description of a table using Google bigquery - google-bigquery

Question

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.

Answer 1

In addition to INFORMATION_SCHEMA, you can also run the following from the console command line (cloud shell)
bq show --schema --format=prettyjson dataset.table
I prefer this for tables that have nested records.

Answer 2

You could do like
SELECT
* EXCEPT(is_generated, generation_expression, is_stored, is_updatable)
FROM
paj.dw.INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS
WHERE
table_name="MY_TABLE"
For other information schema views and example see this page.

Answer 3

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 |
+--------------------------+-------------+-----------+