Summary
The cost question gets answered before the bill.
Dry runs are the reason to reach for this one: an assistant can price a query and read the partition warning before it spends anything, and with non-SELECT statements refused and a byte ceiling in place, a bad guess costs less than it would from a console.
What it is
A read-only path into a BigQuery project: the datasets in it, the tables and schemas in a dataset, a table's structure with sample rows, a dry run that prices a query, and SELECT execution.
What you get
- Every dataset in the project
- The tables in a dataset with their schemas, partitioning and descriptions
- One table's schema plus sample rows, with a warning when a partitioned table is queried without a filter
- A query checked for validity and priced — bytes processed and estimated cost — without running it
- SELECT queries executed, with configurable limits on results and bytes billed
Requirements
A Google Cloud project and BigQuery credentials — Application Default Credentials or a service account key file — with the project ID and location passed on the launch command. Authentication is verified when the server starts.