Introduction to the BigQuery console

The best way to understand BigQuery is by using it, so let’s start with a simple exercise. This first exercise will focus on understanding the BigQuery console. The BigQuery console is your main user interface for developing and using BigQuery. In this exercise, we will create a dataset and table and query the table using the BigQuery console.

Let’s start our exercise by opening the BigQuery console from our browser:

1. Open your GCP console.
2. Go to the navigation bar and choose BigQuery. This is the BigQuery main page, called the BigQuery console:

Figure 3.1 – BigQuery console

3. As you can see, there are many buttons and panels in the BigQuery console. There are three main sections on the page. On the left-hand side, there is the BigQuery menu bar, where you can see SQL Workspace, Data Transfers, Scheduled Queries, and the other menus. The second section is the Explorer section...