This is a quick recap of what’s launched in BigQuery over the past few weeks.

Numeric Beta

NUMERIC data type launched into Public Beta. This data type is useful if you’re doing financial reporting and require a precise money data type with exact decimals. This support propagates to ingest formats. To start using this type, simply create new tables with this data type and load data!

Prior to availability of this feature, folks had admittedly an arduous time working with financial data, leveraging integers and keeping track of floating points, making even simple arithmetic hard. NUMERIC type dramatically simplifies this use case.

BigQuery self service Cost Controls

Project-level query cost control limits will now be applied within minutes. The Cloud Console Quota page will show current utilization for projects with a limit defined:

With this release, folks can more effectively manage and monitor their spend on BigQuery. Setting a daily project-wide budget is now fast and easy.

Enhancing DML

BigQuery released the MERGE statement to Beta. This DML statement simplifies folks’ ability to efficiently and atomically insert, update, and delete data in a table.

BigQuery has added DML support over tables that have an active streaming buffer. This positively impacts ease of use and flexibility.

BigQuery has also relaxed quotas on UPDATE, DELETE, and MERGE DML statements from 96 to 200 per table per day. This may not seem like a lot, but it’s important to note that each statement can process an unlimited number of rows at one time. You can update table data based on the results of a query (via correlated mutations), and batching such operations is a useful best practice for BigQuery.

These improvements to DML make it easier for you to manage changes to your data in BigQuery.

Raised Load Quotas

You may have noticed that we’ve raised a couple of defaults for our ingest quotas:

row and cell size limit for CSV files has changed from 10MB to 100MB.

The row size limit for JSON files has changed from 10MB to 100MB.

BigQuery quotas are there to protect the user, so if your use case requires higher limits, please talk to us!

As always, please let us know how you like these features, by tweeting at us, posting on StackOverflow, or via to the BigQuery issue tracker! There is much much more on the roadmap, many new features are coming soon, and we’re looking forward to hearing from you! Be sure to catch us at GCP Next July 24–26!