View with parameters in BigQuery

Question

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?

Answer 1

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!

Answer 2

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