Rename datasets in BigQuery

Question

Could I request a feature to allow renaming datasets in BigQuery. I have a few datasets with 1000+ tables. I would like to rename the dataset without copying every single table.

Answer 1

Thanks for the feature request. There are a couple of reasons why this would be a difficult feature to add. One reason is that it couldn't be done atomically, given our current architecture. That would mean we'd have to move tables individually in the BigQuery server, which doesn't seem ideal.

One thing that we could add relatively easily, is an atomic table move function that moves your table from one dataset to another. This would save you the copy. Would that be helpful?

Either way, a better way to communicate feature requests is via the BigQuery public issue tracker here: https://code.google.com/p/google-bigquery/issues/list