qlycool / bigrquery

An interface to Google's bigquery from R.

bigrquery

The bigrquery provides a read-only interface to Google BigQuery. It makes it easy to retrieve metadata about your projects, datasets, tables and jobs, and provides a convenient wrapper for working with bigquery from R.

bigrquery is not currently available on CRAN, but you can install it with devtools:

devtools::install_github("assertthat")
devtools::install_github("bigrquery")

Authentication

The first time you use bigrquery in a session, it will ask you to authorize bigrquery in the browser. This gives bigrquery the credentials to access data on your behalf. By default, bigrquery picks up httr's policy of caching per-working-directory credentials in .httr-oauth.

Note that bigrquery requests permission to modify your data; in general, the only data created or modified by bigrquery are the temporary tables created as query results, unless you explicitly modify your own data (say by calling delete_table or insert_upload_job).

Sample data and a billing project

If you just want to play around with the bigquery API, it's easiest to start with the Google's free sample data. To do that, you'll also need to create your own project for billing purposes. If you're just playing around, it's unlikely that you'll go over the 10,000 request/day free limit, but google still needs a project that it can bill (you don't even need to provide a credit card).

To create a project:

1. Open https://cloud.google.com/console
2. Click "Create Project" at the top
3. Select a name and project ID, and click "Create"
4. Turn on the BigQuery API by clicking "APIs & Auth" on the left, scrolling down to "BigQuery API", and clicking the button at the right from "OFF" to "ON".
5. Click on "Overview" at the left
6. Either the Project ID or Project Number at the top can be used to identify your project with bigrquery.

library(bigrquery)
billing_project <- "341409650721" # put your project number here
sql <- "SELECT year, month, day, weight_pounds FROM natality LIMIT 5"
query_exec("publicdata", "samples", sql, billing = billing_project)

Useful links

• SQL reference
• API reference
• Query/job console
• Billing console