Query external tables from your BigQuery connection

ThoughtSpot supports querying external tables stored in external data stores, such as Amazon S3 or Google Cloud Storage, via your cloud data warehouse. These external tables can be in formats such as text, parquet, avro, or json, depending on the formats your cloud data warehouse supports.

After you create the external tables in your BigQuery environment and connect to BigQuery in ThoughtSpot, you can query them like any other table in your connection. You can also join them to other tables in the connection, as long as they belong to the same connection. External tables in ThoughtSpot behave in the same way that regular tables from your connection do. However, note that there may be performance implications when querying the external tables, since you do not store them in the cloud data warehouse.

This option is available for Amazon Redshift, Google BigQuery, and Snowflake.

Supported data stores and file formats

ThoughtSpot supports any data stores or file formats that BigQuery supports. Refer to the BigQuery documentation for more information: External tables.

Querying your external tables

To query your external tables in ThoughtSpot, follow these steps:

  1. Ensure that BigQuery supports your data store(s) and file format(s). Refer to Supported data stores and file formats.

  2. Create the external table(s) in BigQuery. For assistance, refer to the BigQuery documentation.

  3. Create your BigQuery connection, if you have not already done so. When selecting tables, select the external tables you want to query, as well as any other tables. Refer to Add a BigQuery connection.

  4. Search the data from your external table.