Getting Started with SQL in BigQuery

I hope you have read all the past posts and now are ready to move on to writing some SQL.  As you might remember, SQL is short for Structured Query Language. This is the language used to interact with the data contained in most of the databases including BigQuery.

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In this post, I will get you started with writing SQL and show you the most common SQL commands that you will end up using.  This command will be the basis for a lot of advanced commands and SQL queries that we will cover in the future. Also, the skills that you will build are also transferable to other database systems.

Let’s take a simple user case to start learning SQL and BigQuery user interface for writing SQL or SQL Queries.  

Let’s say you want to look at all the data that’s contained in the latest events table.

In order to do that:

1. Go to your project

2. Expand the dataset that contains the tables

3. Click on the three vertical dots next to the events_(##) table. ## is a number that indicates the number of days of the data contained in the events table.

4. In the menu that opens up, click on “Query”

5. This will open up the query interface in your right-hand panel. This is where you will write the query.

By following the above steps the basic structure of the SQL query is also prewritten for you. You can use the same technique for writing queries for other tables as well.

Here is what the query interface looks like:

The query that’s prewritten for you is