time partitioned BigQuery tables - google-bigquery

Does Google Datalab support time partitioned BigQuery table's specific partition as query result destination tables ? For example:
from gcp import bigquery as bq
queryString = 'SELECT "a1" AS col1'
tabNam = 'Feature.test$20141228'
bq.Query(queryString).execute(table_name=tabNam, table_mode='create')

My guess is that this feature is not needed to be somehow specially supported by Datalab, because the only what you need to do is to supply table name with time partition as suffix (like you have it in your question - Feature.test$20141228). Of course you need to make sure first that your table (Feature.test) is properly configured with timePartitioning table's property

There is great feature for tables in Google Big Query. If you have several tables with the same name + (Date), e.g test20141228, test20141229...
You will have a set of tables with a scroll down button, as shown in the pic, which is really nice.
Then you can use wild card function TABLE_DATE_RANGE([Feature.test], date1, date2) to query tables between testdate1 ~ testdate2, which is also really nice.

Related

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.

Is it possible to overwrite a partition in BigQuery?

This article: https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/docs/writing-results states that it is possible to overwrite a BigQuery table with new data however what I'd like to do is overwrite a partition (or multiple partitions). Is that possible?
I've read through tonnes of of documentation about inserting data into BigQuery (e.g. https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/docs/creating-column-partitions) and can't find any reference to overwriting partitions so I assume the answer to my question is "no", but thought I'd ask anyway.
You can always over-write a partitioned table in BQ using the postfix of YYYYMMDD in the output table name of your query, along with using WRITE_TRUNCATE as your write disposition (i.e. to truncate whatever is existing in that partition and write new results).
So, lets say when you run your query, and you want to overwrite a partition for date 2019-01-15 in your table named xyz, you just set the output destination for your query results to be yourdataset.xyz$20190115 and specify the write disposition to be WRITE_TRUNCATE.
Hope it helps.
You are in luck! This is possible through MERGE DML.
https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/docs/using-dml-with-partitioned-tables#pruning_partitions_when_using_a_merge_statement
My advice is to play around with it a bit. If you can't get it working, post a new question with specific data/queries.

How to lower case entire column data in Google Cloud BigQuery

I am trying to find a "quick" way to lower case all the data (strings) in a table's column inside Google Cloud BigQuery.
Before going into building a script, I'm looking for more shorter way like Query.
How can I query BigQuery to lower case entire column?
You can use an UPDATE statement:
UPDATE YourTable
SET string_column = LOWER(string_column)
WHERE true;
How can I query BigQuery to lower case entire column?
Definitely LOWER is the function to use
For example
#standardSQL
WITH `dataset.table` AS (
SELECT
'https://stackoverflow.com/q/44970976/5221944' AS url,
'How to lower case entire column data in Google Cloud BigQuery' AS title
)
SELECT * REPLACE(LOWER(title) AS title)
FROM `dataset.table`
I am trying to find a "quick" way to lower case all the data
From what I see in your question - I would not recommend using DML's UPDATE as it is Costly and not necessarily "quick" and for sure not flexible in case if you later will want to change your mind let say to have it UPPER or somehow differently (camel style for example)
The quick way in your case I see in creating view like below. It is cheap ($0.00) and flexible to accomodate any logic of transforming columns in original table
SELECT * REPLACE(LOWER(title) AS title)
FROM `dataset.table`
Found out my self. it can be done using UPDATE as Elliott suggested. but it must use standartSQL. I used the #standardSQL declration for that.
#standardSQL
UPDATE dataset.table
SET field = LOWER(field)
WHERE TRUE

View with parameters in BigQuery

We have a set of events (kind of log) that we want to connect to get the current state. To improve performance/cost further, we would like to create snapshots (in order to not check all the events in history, but only from the last snapshot). Logs and snapshots are the tables with date suffix.
This approach works OK in the BQ, but we need to manually define the query every time. Is there any way to define 'view' with parameters (e.g. dates for the table range query)? Or any plans to do something like that?
I know that there are some topics connected with TABLE_RANGE / QUERY in views (eg Use of TABLE_DATE_RANGE function in Views). Are there any new information on this subject?
That's a great feature request - but currently not supported. Please leave more details at https://code.google.com/p/google-bigquery/issues/list, the BigQuery team takes these requests very seriously!
As a workaround i wrote a small framework to generate complex queries with help of velocity templates. Just published it at https://github.com/softkot/gbq
Now you can use Table Functions (aka table-valued functions - TVF) to achieve this. They are very similar to a view but they accept a parameter. I've tested and they really help to save a lot while keeping future queries simple, since the complexity is inside the Table Function definition. It receives a parameter that you can then use inside the query for filtering.
This example is from the documentation:
CREATE OR REPLACE TABLE FUNCTION mydataset.names_by_year(y INT64)
AS
SELECT year, name, SUM(number) AS total
FROM `bigquery-public-data.usa_names.usa_1910_current`
WHERE year = y
GROUP BY year, name
Then you just query it like this:
SELECT * FROM mydataset.names_by_year(1950)
More details can be found in the oficial documentation.
You can have a look at BigQuery scripting that have been released in beta : https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/docs/reference/standard-sql/scripting

Dynamically Querying Multiple Tables In BigQuery

I have a BigQuery database where daily data is uploaded into it's own table. So I have tables named "20131201", "20131202", etc. I can write a fixed query to "merge" those tables by doing:
SELECT * FROM db.20131201, db.20131202, ...
I'd like to have a single query that does not require me to update the Custom SQL everytime a new table is added. Something like:
SELECT * FROM db.*
Which currently doesn't work. I would like to avoid making one giant table. Is there a work-around that I can do, or will this have to be a feature request?
End-goal is for a Tableau data connection to all the tables.
This isn't exactly what you've asked for, but I've managed to use https://developers.google.com/bigquery/query-reference#tablewildcardfunctions in particular
TABLE_DATE_RANGE(prefix, timestamp1, timestamp2)
to achieve a similar result for use in tableaux. You'll still need to provide 2 date parameters, but it's substantially better than dynamically generating the FROM clause.
Hope this helps.
As of now in google bigquery this dynamic Sql [like "EXECUTE SQL" in mssqlserver] is not avilable...sulry google will look inthis i belive :)