Database Reference
In-Depth Information
has been set up and configured, most users don't need to bother with it.
However, when starting, it is helpful to understand how projects are used
and configured.
Project Names
A project serves as the root of the namespace for all other BigQuery objects;
that is, in order to talk about other objects, you need to specify which project
it belongs to. The names are visible when using the raw BigQuery HTTP API;
the URLs for all BigQuery accesses include
projects/
<project id>
to
indicate which project is being addressed. Because objects such as tables or
datasets from different users will be in different projects, they don't have to
worry about naming collisions. Project names are guaranteed to be unique
by the Google Developers Console.
Projects have two or even three names, which can be a cause for confusion.
The first name is the project's
friendly name
, which is the name you specify
when you create the project. This name is not unique; it is just an
easy-to-remember string. However, because it can be ambiguous, the
friendly name is not useful to BigQuery in naming objects.
The second name is the
project number
. All projects have a 64-bit number
that uniquely identifies them. These numbers are assigned when the project
is created; they are visible at the end of the Google Developers Console
URL (for example,
https://console.developers.google.com/
status page. Everywhere in BigQuery where you can specify a project, you
can use this 64-bit number. Most of the time, unless you construct API
requests by hand, you do not need to use this number directly. The BigQuery
web UI enables you to select the project to use from a drop-down of your
available projects, and the command-line client saves your default project
number in a local file. If you access BigQuery programmatically, you'll likely
have the project number stashed in a constant somewhere.
Because it can be a pain to type and even more difficult to remember a
64-bit number, the Developers Console provides another way to name a
project: the
project ID
. These IDs can be more convenient to type than
project numbers and also make it easier to know at a glance what the
project contains. For example, the project for the sample application used in
this topic is called
bigquery-sensors
, which is easier to remember than
1036853159133.
