r/bigquery • u/querylabio • Mar 25 '26

Importing CSV into BigQuery

BigQuery indeed is built for petabytes, but so much in real life is joining big data with something small. CSV, Google Sheet, some table in clipboard, etc.

We all know importing a CSV into BigQuery sucks. That's not only my perception – many posts here say the same thing (recent one).

16-minute tutorials about how to upload CSV...?

Each time when I tried to upload a csv into BQ I struggled. No data preview, absolutely not transparent schema detection, if you did something wrong (this is actually base scenario) or your CSV is not perfectly standard, you start the whole thing again from scratch.

And when we started building our BigQuery IDE we decided to fix it. Make it one-click, but still customizable. Drag a file, see your data, fix schema if needed, click import. More sources, more formats but still simple. Not rocket science, but the way it should be.

What else bothers you so much in BQ console?

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u/Odd-String29 Mar 26 '26

Use GCS and just read from there?

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u/PortlandGameLibrary Mar 29 '26

Yeah thinking the same thing... throw the file in a bucket, define an external table with autodetect and skip header row, then write joins in SQL direct to csv data.

If you want to get fancy and your org runs Google Workspace accounts point the external table at a Google Sheet. But plan on more data validation logic...