How to use "temporary tables" via WITH (named subqueries) in Google BigQuery

Posted by Pascal Landau on 2020-05-29 13:00:00

In Google BigQuery we can define named subqueries via WITH clauses. Those WITH clauses are a very comfortable way to structure complex queries as it allows to reference those queries like actual tables later on.

Note: BigQuery also supports actual temporary tables via CREATE TEMPORARY TABLE. See the official documention on temporary tables for further infos. This is out of scope for this snippet, though.

Code

WITH filtered_data as (
  SELECT 
    id
  FROM
    table
  WHERE
    id BETWEEN 5 and 10
)
SELECT
  *
FROM
  filtered_data  

Working Example

Run on BigQuery

Open in BigQuery Console

BigQuery Console: How to use temporay tables via WITH named subqueries example

Links

Use cases

Named subqueries are a great way to structure complex queries and give sub-results a meaningful name. When working with partitioned tables, I always use temporary tables via WITH to make sure I restrict the query to scan only a limited number of partitions.

Conceptual example: ```` DECLARE from_date TIMESTAMP DEFAULT "2018-04-09"; DECLARE to_date TIMESTAMP DEFAULT "2018-04-10";

WITH huge_table_partition as( SELECT * FROM huge_table WHERE _PARTITIONTIME BETWEEN from_date AND to_date )

SELECT * FROM huge_table_partition ```


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