Hidden gems of Google BigQuery

BigQuery is amazing. It is one of my favorite tools within Google Cloud. Luckily, it looks like Google feels the same and, to the joy of BigQuery fans, keeps adding new features there. No matter how long I have been working with BigQuery, there is always something new I discover once in a while. Today I want to share with you the following four things: the AUTO column, multi-statement transactions, clustering, and indexes. These are great features that, in my opinion, are not paid enough attention to in documentation or talks. AUTO column  This one is truly a “hidden gem”. You won’t find it in the official documentation (at least I didn’t manage to do so). It is only mentioned in Google Issue Tracker . Let’s say you push some data into BigQuery, and then another system wants to run a scheduled job to process the newly arrived data. For example, a system can try to pull data from BigQuery to another storage, or this system needs to run hourly reports based on the data, etc. In each of t