Automate Your BigQuery Schema Definitions With 5 Lines of Python
Tired of manually writing my BigQuery schemas, I wrote a function that makes schema definition less time-consuming.
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Optimizing BigQuery Schema Definitions
One thing I’ve learned while programming is that I’d rather do more work now to do less work later.
That’s why, if I find myself performing a redundant operation, I begin exploring the possibility of writing a function or implementing another method to avoid doing mundane, repetitive work.
Schema definition, while important, is one of the most mundane, repetitive tasks I do as a data engineer. While this task can be completed in the BigQuery UI, since I primarily use the Python client, I define my schemas manually to ensure that GCP doesn’t parse anything wrong.
In doing so, I often end up with some pretty ugly, lengthy code that, even with a config file, can become unruly.
If you’re dealing with nested fields, it can become downright unpleasant, like the below snippet:
