An Interface to Google's 'BigQuery' 'API'

Easily talk to Google's 'BigQuery' database from R.

The bigrquery packages provides an R interface to Google BigQuery. It makes it easy to retrieve metadata about your projects, datasets, tables and jobs, and provides a convenient wrapper for working with bigquery from R.

Installation

The current bigrquery release can be installed from CRAN:

install.packages("bigrquery")

The newest development release can be installed from github:

# install.packages('devtools')
devtools::install_github("rstats-db/bigrquery")

Authentication

The first time you use bigrquery in a session, it will ask you to authorize bigrquery in the browser. This gives bigrquery the credentials to access data on your behalf. By default, bigrquery picks up httr's policy of caching per-working-directory credentials in .httr-oauth.

Note that bigrquery requests permission to modify your data; in general, the only data created or modified by bigrquery are the temporary tables created as query results, unless you explicitly modify your own data (say by calling delete_table() or insert_upload_job()).

Sample data and a billing project

If you just want to play around with the bigquery API, it's easiest to start with the Google's free sample data. To do that, you'll also need to create your own project for billing purposes. If you're just playing around, it's unlikely that you'll go over the 10,000 request/day free limit, but google still needs a project that it can bill (you don't even need to provide a credit card).

To create a project:

Open https://console.cloud.google.com/
Click "Create Project" at the top
Select a name and project ID, and click "Create"
Turn on the BigQuery API by clicking "APIs & Auth" on the left, scrolling down to "BigQuery API", and clicking the button at the right from "OFF" to "ON".
Click on "Overview" at the left
Use the Project ID or Project Number to identify your project with bigrquery. (You can also use the project number, though it's harder to remember.)

To run your first query:

library(bigrquery)
project <- "fantastic-voyage-389" # put your project ID here
sql <- "SELECT year, month, day, weight_pounds FROM [publicdata:samples.natality] LIMIT 5"
query_exec(sql, project = project)

Useful links

News

Version 0.3.0

New set_service_token() allows you to use OAuth service token instead of interactive authentication.from
^ is correctly translated to pow() (#110).
Provide full DBI compliant interface (@krlmlr).
Backend now translates iflese() to IF (@realAkhmed, #53).

Version 0.2.0.

Compatiable with latest httr.
Computation of the SQL data type that corresponds to a given R object is now more robust against unknown classes. (#95, @krlmlr)
A data frame with full schema information is returned for zero-row results. (#88, @krlmlr)
New exists_table(). (#91, @krlmlr)
New arguments create_disposition and write_disposition to insert_upload_job(). (#92, @krlmlr)
Renamed option bigquery.quiet to bigrquery.quiet. (#89, @krlmlr)
New format_dataset() and format_table(). (#81, @krlmlr)
New list_tabledata_iter() that allows fetching a table in chunks of varying size. (#77, #87, @krlmlr)
Add support for API keys via the BIGRQUERY_API_KEY environment variable. (#49)