How to Migrate BigQuery Datasets from one region to another?

For customers in the FSI space, ensuring the Data residency clause is of utmost importance. This in turn requires migration of datasets from one region to another to adhere to such norms.

Migrating Datasets across regions in BigQuery, earlier had to be done via exporting the data to GCS and moving the data from source region to destination region and then re-importing to the new Bigquery dataset region. This process involves multiple steps and will involve efforts to build pipelines to automate this.

With the new feature of Cross-region dataset replication in BigQuery, this entire process is now simplified. let us explore the migration process for one of the datasets,

I will take a dataset which is hosted in the us-central1 region,

I will now go ahead and replicate this dataset to asia-south2 region,

We can now see the replication status in the Information_schema table,

The replicated dataset will not be viewable in the explorer workspace. So to test or query the new dataset replica, you can change the query settings to point to asia-south2 region and then query the dataset.

we can now promote the replciated dataset as the primary,

When you now explore the HR Analytics dataset in the Explorer, you will notice it is now pointing to the asia-south2 region.

Obvious question arises on what are the objects that get replicated, here is the snapshot of the resources that get migrated,

More details on this process can be found here.