File: 0: Unexpected from Google BigQuery load job - google-bigquery

Question

I've a compressed json file (900MB, newline delimited) and load into a new table via bq command and get the load failure:
e.g.
bq load --project_id=XXX --source_format=NEWLINE_DELIMITED_JSON --ignore_unknown_values mtdataset.mytable gs://xxx/data.gz schema.json
Waiting on bqjob_r3ec270ec14181ca7_000001461d860737_1 ... (1049s) Current status: DONE
BigQuery error in load operation: Error processing job 'XXX:bqjob_r3ec270ec14181ca7_000001461d860737_1': Too many errors encountered. Limit is: 0.
Failure details:
- File: 0: Unexpected. Please try again.
Why the error?
I tried again with the --max_bad_records, still not useful error message
bq load --project_id=XXX --source_format=NEWLINE_DELIMITED_JSON --ignore_unknown_values --max_bad_records 2 XXX.test23 gs://XXX/20140521/file1.gz schema.json
Waiting on bqjob_r518616022f1db99d_000001461f023f58_1 ... (319s) Current status: DONE
BigQuery error in load operation: Error processing job 'XXX:bqjob_r518616022f1db99d_000001461f023f58_1': Unexpected. Please try again.
And also cannot find any useful message in the console.
To BigQuery team, can you have a look using the job ID?

Answer 1

As far I know there are two error sections on a job. There is one error result, and that's what you see now. And there is a second, which should be a stream of errors. This second is important as you could have errors in it, but the actual job might succeed.
Also you can set the --max_bad_records=3 on the BQ tool. Check here for more params https://developers.google.com/bigquery/bq-command-line-tool
You probably have an error that is for each line, so you should try a sample set from this big file first.
Also there is an open feature request to improve the error message, you can star (vote) this ticket https://code.google.com/p/google-bigquery-tools/issues/detail?id=13
This answer will be picked up by the BQ team, so for them I am sharing that: We need an endpoint where we can query based on a jobid, the state, or the stream of errors. It would help a lot to get a full list of errors, it would help debugging the BQ jobs. This could be easy to implement.

Answer 2

I looked up this job in the BigQuery logs, and unfortunately, there isn't any more information than "failed to read" somewhere after about 930 MB have been read.
I've filed a bug that we're dropping important error information in one code path and submitted a fix. However, this fix won't be live until next week, and all that will do is give us more diagnostic information.
Since this is repeatable, it isn't likely a transient error reading from GCS. That means one of two problems: we have trouble decoding the .gz file, or there is something wrong with that particular GCS object.
For the first issue, you could try decompressing the file and re-uploading it as uncompressed. While it may sound like a pain to send gigabytes of data over the network, the good news is that the import will be faster since it can be done in parallel (we can't import a compressed file in parallel since it can only be read sequentially).
For the second issue (which is somewhat less likely) you could try downloading the file yourself to make sure you don't get errors, or try re-uploading the same file and seeing if that works.