Version Control in Big Query [duplicate] - version-control

Question

I am working with bigquery, and there have been a few hundred views created. Most of these are not used and should be deleted. However, there is a chance that some are used and I cannot just blindly delete all. Therefore, I need to backup all view definitions somehow before deleting them.
Does anyone know of a good way? I am not trying to save the data, just the view definition queries and their names.
Thanks for reading!

Answer 1

Building off the existing answer, you can automate the backing up of all views by parsing the output of bq with jq:
#!/bin/bash
DATASETS=$(bq ls --format=sparse | tail -n+3)
for d in $DATASETS; do
TABLES=$(bq ls --format=prettyjson "$d" | jq '.[] | "\(.id), \(.type)"')
IFS=$'\n'
for table in $TABLES; do
[[ ! "$table" == *VIEW* ]] && continue
view=$(echo "$table" | sed -e 's/"//g' | cut -d , -f 1)
query=$(bq show --format=prettyjson "$view" | jq -r '.view.query')
echo -e "$query" > "$view.sql"
done
done

Answer 2

Part 1.
Issue the bq ls command. The --format flag can be used to control the output. If you are listing views in a project other than your default project, add the project ID to the dataset in the following format: [PROJECT_ID]:[DATASET].
bq ls --format=pretty [PROJECT_ID]:[DATASET]
Where:
[PROJECT_ID] is your project ID.
[DATASET] is the name of the dataset.
When you run the command, the Type field displays either TABLE or VIEW. For example:
+-------------------------+-------+----------------------+-------------------+
| tableId | Type | Labels | Time Partitioning |
+-------------------------+-------+----------------------+-------------------+
| mytable | TABLE | department:shipping | |
| myview | VIEW | | |
+-------------------------+-------+----------------------+-------------------+
Part 2.
Issue the bq show command. The --format flag can be used to control the output. If you are getting information about a view in a project other than your default project, add the project ID to the dataset in the following format: [PROJECT_ID]:[DATASET]. To write the view properties to a file, add > [PATH_TO_FILE] to the command.
bq show --format=prettyjson [PROJECT_ID]:[DATASET].[VIEW] > [PATH_TO_FILE]
Where:
[PROJECT_ID] is your project ID.
[DATASET] is the name of the dataset.
[VIEW] is the name of the view.
[PATH_TO_FILE] is the path to the output file on your local machine.
Examples:
Enter the following command to display information about myview in mydataset. mydataset is in your default project.
bq show --format=prettyjson mydataset.myview
Enter the following command to display information about myview in mydataset. mydataset is in myotherproject, not your default project. The view properties are written to a local file — /tmp/myview.json.
bq show --format=prettyjson myotherproject:mydataset.myview > /tmp/myview.json

Answer 3

You could try using bqup, which is a python script that some colleagues and I have been using to regularly back up BigQuery views and table schemata.