What is the max limit of group_concat/string_agg in bigquery output? - google-bigquery

Question

I am using group_concat/string_agg (possibly varchar) and want to ensure that bigquery won't drop any of the data concatenated.

Answer 1

BigQuery will not drop data if a particular query runs out of memory; you will get an error instead. You should try to keep your row sizes below ~100MB, since beyond that you'll start getting errors. You can try creating a large string with an example like this:
#standardSQL
SELECT STRING_AGG(word) AS words FROM `bigquery-public-data.samples.shakespeare`;
There are 164,656 rows in this table, and this query creates a string with 1,168,286 characters (around a megabyte in size). You'll start to see an error if you run a query that requires more than something on the order of hundreds of megabytes on a single node of execution, though:
#standardSQL
SELECT STRING_AGG(CONCAT(word, corpus)) AS words
FROM `bigquery-public-data.samples.shakespeare`
CROSS JOIN UNNEST(GENERATE_ARRAY(1, 1000));
This results in an error:
Resources exceeded during query execution.
If you click on the "Explanation" tab in the UI, you can see that the failure happened during stage 1 while building the results of STRING_AGG. In this case, the string would have been 3,303,599,000 characters long, or approximately 3.3 GB in size.

Answer 2

Adding to Elliot's answer - how to fix:
This query (Elliot's) fails:
#standardSQL
SELECT STRING_AGG(CONCAT(word, corpus)) AS words
FROM `bigquery-public-data.samples.shakespeare`
CROSS JOIN UNNEST(GENERATE_ARRAY(1, 1000));
But you can LIMIT the number of strings concatenated to get a working solution:
#standardSQL
SELECT STRING_AGG(CONCAT(word, corpus) LIMIT 10) AS words
FROM `bigquery-public-data.samples.shakespeare`
CROSS JOIN UNNEST(GENERATE_ARRAY(1, 1000));