Google BigQuery - Insert All with Table Suffix failing - google-bigquery

I have a project where I was previously creating tables on Insert. I am attempting to instead perform an insertAll with a templateSuffix. It seems to work great with new tables, but I have this odd case.
The following URL (https://gist.github.com/dovy/b5b5b25e660ac037aaa130294ab42e3a) provides an example insert. I have some data from a source, the desired table (table_schema.txt) and a template schema (table_template_schema.txt). The only difference between the two schemas is the order of the last 2 columns:
|- cache_file: string
|- deduped: integer
The error I get is
HttpError:
https://www.googleapis.com/bigquery/v2/projects/flash-student-96619/datasets/log_data_v7/tables/day/insertAll?alt=json
returned "Provided Schema does not match Table
flash-student-96619:log_data_v7.day20160423. Template and generated
table schemas are incompatible"
Is insertAll really that picky? There's no way to re-order columns unless I do a query and replace on the same table. That seems incredibly painful.
Any clues from anyone out there?

I ended up doing a standard insert without tableSuffix and if it failed (try/catch) I did a insert with tableSuffix. That bypasses this insane requirement of perfect order and all works for me.
Just wish I didn't have to get around this.

Related

Is the column of type JSON deprecated?

In the bigquery console, when creating a table, there used to be type JSON as an option for the column types but weirdly enought it was never present in their docs We used this column type in our production tables, and discovered later on that you can't select it in queries otherwise bigquery throws an error, and the json functions also didn't work with it. So we simply stopped using this column in the queries but they still exist in our tables.
However, in the past couple of days, all queries against this table are failing with this error 400 Json is not enabled for current project. and this column type is not present in the bigquery console anymore. It seems it was removed or deprecated? I checked the release notes, but the latest release was way before the error occured. This broke our production environment, and we couldnt even export the data because exporting gave the same error. Instead we had to use a new table without this column which meant we lost all our history.
Did anyone face the same problem with any other column types before, is it normal that a type is deprecated without users being notified beforehand. This is making me question the reliability of bigquery.
Please reach out to Google Cloud support and we will help you fix your issue with that problematic table. You may also want to try fixing it yourself using the ALTER TABLE DROP COLUMN statement that is currently in public preview [1]. This will drop the erroneous column (the data in that column only will be lost). The rest of the data will remain usable.
[1] https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/docs/reference/standard-sql/data-definition-language#alter_table_drop_column_statement
I ran into the same error message few days ago and was surprised to read about this policy change that's not backed up by a mitigation process. My attempt to use Vlad Grachev suggestion to drop this column did not prevail, as the console does not allow to query this table (same "Json is not enabled for current project." error).
My only remediation at this point is:
build a new table where the json column is switched to type string
create a pipeline that transforms the objects to strings
migrate the data through the pipeline to the new table
In BigQuery Json data can be stored in a column type "Record.Are you referring the same by JSON column type?
BigQuery uses the RECORD (or STRUCT) type to represent nested structure. A column of RECORD type is in fact a large column containing multiple child columns. For more information Refer the link below,
Json Data in BigQuery
if you are not refering to the Record Data type, The Json Column type might be a test feature that might not dependent on deprecation scheme

Unable to load partitions in Athena with case sensitivity ON

I have data in S3 which is partitioned in YYYY/MM/DD/HH/ structure (not year=YYYY/month=MM/day=DD/hour=HH)
I set up a Glue crawler for this, which creates a table in Athena, but when I query the data in Athena it gives an error as one field has duplicate name (URL and url , which the SerDe converts to lowercase, causing a name conflict).
To fix this, I manually create another table (using the above table definition SHOW CREATE TABLE), adding 'case.insensitive'= FALSE to the SERDEPROPERTIES
WITH SERDEPROPERTIES ('paths'='deviceType,emailId,inactiveDuration,pageData,platform,timeStamp,totalTime,userId','case.insensitive'= FALSE)
I changed the s3 directory structure to the hive-compatible naming year=/month=/day=/hour= and then created the table with 'case.insensitive'= FALSE, then ran the MSCK REPAIR TABLE command for the new table, which loads all the partitions.
(Complete CREATE TABLE QUERY)
But upon querying, I can only find 1 data column (platform) and the partition columns, rest of all the columns are not parsed. But I've actually copied the Glue-generated CREATE TABLE query, with the case_insensitive=false condition.
How can I fix this?
I think you have multiple, separate issues: one with the crawler, and one with the serde, and one with duplicate keys:
Glue Crawler
If Glue Crawler delivered on what they promise they would be a fairly good solution for most situations and would save us from writing the same code over and over again. Unfortunately, if you stray outside of the (undocumented) use cases Glue Crawler was designed for, you often end up with various issues, from the strange to the completely broken (see for example this question, this question, this question, this question, this question, or this question).
I recommend that you skip Glue Crawler and instead write the table DDL by hand (you have a good template in what the crawler created, it just isn't good enough). Then you write a Lambda function (or shell script) that you run on a schedule to add new partitions.
Since your partitioning is only on time, this is a fairly simple script: it just needs to run every once in a while and add the partition for the next period.
It looks like your data is from Kinesis Data Firehose which produces a partitioned structure at hour granularity. Unless you have lots of data coming every hour I recommend you create a table that is only partitioned on date, and run the Lambda function or script once per day to add the next day's partition.
A benefit from not using Glue Crawler is that you don't have to have a one-to-one correspondence between path components and partition keys. You can have a single partition key that is typed as date, and add partitions like this: ALTER TABLE foo ADD PARTITION (dt = '2020-05-13') LOCATION 's3://some-bucket/data/2020/05/13/'. This is convenient because it's much easier to do range queries on a full date than when the components are separate.
If you really need hourly granularity you can either have two partition keys, one which is the date and one the hour, or just the one with the full timestamp, e.g. ALTER TABLE foo ADD PARTITION (ts = '2020-05-13 10:00:00') LOCATION 's3://some-bucket/data/2020/05/13/10/'. Then run the Lambda function or script every hour, adding the next hour's partition.
Having too a granular partitioning doesn't help with performance, and can instead hurt it (although the performance hit comes mostly from the small files and the directories).
SerDe config
As for the reason why you're only seeing the value of the platform column, it's because it's the only case where the column name and property have the same casing.
It's a bit surprising that the DDL you link to doesn't work, but I can confirm that it really doesn't. I tried creating a table from that DDL, but without the pagedata column (I also skipped the partitioning, but that shouldn't make a difference for the test), and indeed only the platform column had any value when I queried the table.
However, when I removed the case.insensitive serde property it worked as expected, which got me thinking that it might not work the way you think it does. I tried setting it to TRUE instead of FALSE, which made the table work as expected again. I think we can conclude from this that the Athena documentation is just wrong when it says "By default, Athena requires that all keys in your JSON dataset use lowercase". In fact, what happens is that Athena lower cases the column names, but it also lower cases the property names when reading the JSON.
With further experimentation it turned out the path property was redundant too. This is a table that worked for me:
CREATE EXTERNAL TABLE `json_case_test` (
`devicetype` string,
`timestamp` string,
`totaltime` string,
`inactiveduration` int,
`emailid` string,
`userid` string,
`platform` string
)
ROW FORMAT SERDE 'org.openx.data.jsonserde.JsonSerDe'
STORED AS INPUTFORMAT 'org.apache.hadoop.mapred.TextInputFormat'
OUTPUTFORMAT 'org.apache.hadoop.hive.ql.io.HiveIgnoreKeyTextOutputFormat'
LOCATION 's3://some-bucket/data/'
I'd say that case.insensitive seems to cause more problems than it solves.
Duplicate keys
When I added the pagedata column (as struct<url:string>) and added "pageData":{"URL":"URL","url":"url"} to the data, I got the error:
HIVE_CURSOR_ERROR: Row is not a valid JSON Object - JSONException: Duplicate key "url"
And I got the error regardless of whether the pagedata column was involved in the query or not (e.g. SELECT userid FROM json_case_test also errored). I tried the case.insensitive serde property with both TRUE and FALSE, but it had no effect.
Next, I took a look at the source documentation for the serde, which first of all is worded much better, and secondly contains the key piece of information: that you also need to provide mappings for the columns when you turn off case insensitivity.
With the following serde properties I was able to get the duplicate key issue to go away:
WITH SERDEPROPERTIES (
"case.insensitive" = "false",
"mapping.pagedata" = "pageData",
"mapping.pagedata.url" = "pagedata.url",
"mapping.pagedata.url2"= "pagedata.URL"
)
You would have to provide mappings for all the columns except for platform, too.
Alternative: use JSON functions
You mentioned in a comment to this answer that the schema of the pageData property is not constant. This is another case where Glue Crawlers unfortunately don't really work. If you're unlucky you'll end up with a flapping schema that includes some properties some days (see for example this question).
What I realised when I saw your comment is that there is another solution to your problem: set up the table manually (as described above) and use string as the type for the pagedata column. Then you can use functions like JSON_EXTRACT_SCALAR to extract the properties you want during query time.
This solution trades increased complexity of the queries for way fewer headaches trying to keep up with an evolving schema.

Doing a SELECT * from TABLE gives "Cannot read field 'records' of type INT64 as UINT64"

I am running into something that appears to be a global BigQuery issue that started maybe only a few days ago. It was definitely working on Jan 7th 2019. I narrowed down the issue to a simple SELECT * FROM TABLE which throws a Cannot read field 'records' of type INT64 as UINT64. The records field is declared as INTEGER in the schema and the table is a result of an aggregate query.
I am getting the same error both programmatically as well as in BigQuery UI.
If I explicitly list STRING fields, the query works. As soon as I reference records which is INTEGER, the query fails.
Job id is dulcet-outlook-94110:US.bquxjob_5883645e_16858aba0ae.
Alternatively, everyone can reproduce this using public data by saving the following query into a temp table and then doing a simple SELECT * from temp.
SELECT state, count(*) cnt FROM [bigquery-public-data:samples.natality]
group by state
This gives a slightly different but essentially the same error: Type mismatch for column 'cnt' in table temp. Expected type 'uint64', actual type 'int64' in file :mdb=cloud-dataengine.
(EDIT: Make sure to use "Allow Large Results" otherwise it will work fine).
Thank you for raising this up. This is indeed a bug in BigQuery, a fix has been completely rolled out now.
For the broken tables, although data is not lost, they have an inconsistent state with the schema. So please try to regenerate them if you can, as for now their schemas won't automatically fix themselves yet. We are working on ways to fix the schema of the existing affected tables, but it might take some time.
If you still have any problem feel free to report to the public issue tracker wpfwannabe created above.

Error: Schema changed for Timestamp field (additional)

I am getting an error message when I query a specific table in my data set that has a nullable timestamp field. In the BigQuery web tool, I run simple query, e.g.:
SELECT * FROM [reztrack.201401] LIMIT 100
The result I get is: Error: Schema changed for Timestamp field date
Example Job ID: esiteisthebomb:job_6WKi7ZhSi8D_Ewr8b5rKV-a5Eac
This is the exact same issue that was noted here: Error: Schema changed for Timestamp field.
Also logged this under: https://code.google.com/p/google-bigquery/issues/detail?id=307 but I was unsure since it said we should be logging everything in Stackoverlfow.
Any information on how to fix this for this or other tables would be greatly appreciated.
Note: The original answer states to contact google support, but Google support for BigQuery was moved to StackOverflow. Therefore I assume that means to open it as a new question in hopes the engineers will respond.
BigQuery recently improved the representation of its internal timestamp format (there had previously been a lot of cases where timestamps broke in strange ways and this change should fix that). Your table still was using the old timestamp format, and you tickled a bug in the old format when schemas changed (in this case, the field went from REQUIRED to OPTIONAL).
We have an automated process that coalesces tables to make their storage more efficient. I scheduled this to run over your table, and have verified that it has rewritten your table using the new timestamp format.
You should now be able to query this field of your table without further problems.

MSAccess SQL Injection

Situation:
I'm doing some penetration testing for a friend of mine and have total clearance to go postal on a demo environment. Reason for this is because I saw a XSS-hole in his online ASP-application (error page with error as param allowing html).
He has a Access DB and because of his lack of input-validation I came upon another hole: he allows sql injection in a where-clause.
I tried some stuff from:
http://www.krazl.com/blog/?p=3
But this gave limited result:
MSysRelationships is open, but his Objects table is shielded.
' UNION SELECT 1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1 FROM MSysRelationships WHERE '1' = '1 <-- worked so I know the parent table has at least 9 columns. I don't know how I can exploit the relation table to get tablenames ( I can't find any structures explanation so I don't know on what to select.
Tried brute-forceing some tablenames, but to no avail.
I do not want to trash his DB, but I do want to point out the serious flaw with some backing.
Anyone has Ideas?
Usually there are two ways to proceed from here. You could try to guess table names by the type of data which is stored in them which often works ("users" usually stores the user data ...). The other method would be to generate speaking error messages in the application to see if you can fetch table or column names from there.