Notes from BenDesk: Incorporating Programming Elements

Ben is our resident ZenDesk captain and manager of all help@ inquiries. We’re bringing you interesting inquiries from his inbox each month to help share learnings across our community.

Question of the Month: Is it possible to incorporate programming elements like variable settings, IF statements, or loops into my SQL queries in BigQuery?

Bendesk Answer:

Absolutely! Procedural SQL enables you to integrate programming elements into your queries through the BigQuery UI. Procedural SQL can be used for various tasks, such as:

• Running multiple SQL statements together as one query

• Setting a default project ID and/or dataset name when creating a series of tables so you don’t have to type them out each time

• Use IF/THEN logic in your queries to answer questions such as “Has this table been updated with today’s data yet?” or to set up branching options for a query based on certain conditions

• Looping through lists of variables for the same query. For example, if you need to run the same query with a different variable in the WHERE clause several times, you can loop through variables to speed up the process and avoid writing out the query multiple times.

• And many other applications!

If you want to start using procedural SQL, you can use it just like a SQL query through your BigQuery UI. For more information and code examples, take a look at our procedural SQL documentation here. For more information, you can check out Google’s documentation here.