Get started with BigQuery

Use this article to access your Direct Access data in Google Cloud BigQuery. BigQuery is a server-less data warehouse that comes with its own managed built-in query engine. This query engine can query a petabyte of data within seconds, allowing business analysis in near real-time.

Your Direct Access data is stored as a BigQuery project, also referred to as a BigQuery instance. A project in BigQuery is equivalent to a database on other data platforms. Projects organize data within a series of top-level data sets that logically group the schema and provide a hierarchy for organizing permissions. These data sets appear in your project as views.  

Caution: Sensitive customer information is stored as a separate data set within your BigQuery project called Priv. Access to this data is provisioned by your administrator. If you have the appropriate permissions, you can query this data set to return details such as customer names, locations, email addresses, and so on. 

In this article:

• Find your Direct Access data in BigQuery
• Run a SQL query in BigQuery

Find your Direct Access data in BigQuery

1. Navigating to Direct Access

   1. Hover over the red bar on the far left of the Retail Application and select Direct Access, as shown In the image below.

   

      
2. Go to the Google Cloud Console and log in to the company email address that's linked to your Google account. See Access Google resources from your work email address.
   
   
3. On the Dashboard tab, select BigQuery
   
   
   
   
4. Next, select Add data 
   
   
   
   
5. On the left, expand the folder named "Soundcommerce-client-companyname" to see the views that contain your direct access data: client_directaccess and priv
   
   
   
6. To quickly navigate to your project, pin it to the Explorer area by selecting Add data > Pin a project > Search for project and enter the project name
   After a project is pinned, you can explore that project's schema or write queries against it in the Editor area.
   
   

Run a SQL query in BigQuery

Once you're in your BigQuery project, you can create and run queries in the Query Editor. For help structuring SQL queries, see Query syntax and  Expressions, functions, and operators in SQL queries.

1. From your BigQuery project, in the Editor, select Compose new query
   
   
   
   
2. Enter the query in the space provided
3. When you're done, select Run
4. To save your query, do one of the following:
   
   
   • If query results are less than 16K rows, save the results to .csv file format, Google sheet, JSON, or a BigQuery table
     
     
   • If query results are greater than 16K rows, save the results as a table, and export it to your local drive or Google BigQuery table.
     Note: Tables are considered temporary and are removed after three days.

To schedule queries and learn more about BigQuery, see Google Cloud BigQuery Support.

For sample SQL queries that address common use cases, see the Related articles.

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