Chris Tippett

Tips & tricks to using BigQuery UDFs

While other databases have allowed users to define their own SQL functions since forever, it was only in 2015 that BigQuery first offered this functionality. Even then, you were limited to writing them in JavaScript – it wouldn’t be until 2018 that SQL based UDFs became generally available, and they were only temporary1 at that!

Fast forward to 2020, BigQuery has supported persistent, SQL-based UDFs for over a year, meaning we can finally create functions that can be persisted indefinitely. Hoorah! 🎉