Google Cloud Billing - Handling schema changes to BigQuery export

Before reading…

• Target Audience: This document is geared towards Google Cloud customers that export their billing data to BigQuery for reporting and analysis. They are technically skilled and familiar with writing queries/code to retrieve and manipulate data from BigQuery.
• Scenario: The schema for billing data exported to BigQuery was updated with additional fields, potentially breaking existing data queries and reports for Google Cloud customers. This document explained how to handle the schema changes and provided sample queries/code that would help future-proof their queries.
• Sources: I wrote 100% of the content other than the sample queries, which were written by the engineer (subject matter expert). The document went through the review process, with peer writers and engineers providing feedback and suggested edits. The information was derived from regular meetings with Technical Program Managers (TPM) and engineers.

…and here are the samples.

The current version of the document is available at Google Cloud. Because the content will continue to evolve, I’ve captured the work I did in the following PDF file. Additionally, because “print to PDF” removes much of a web site’s styling, I’ve included a screenshot image of how the page looked at the time it was published.