Can one have hourly partitions in a BigQuery table?

Question

The google documentation only talks about daily partitions. But is there anything in the model that hinders one from stuffing partitions in a table with other time period (e.g.,

Answer 1

Currently only DAY partitioned tables is supported. Hourly or monthly is not supported. There are several feature request for new functionality but there is no timeline for implementation. You can comment and add your use case on the tickets as well to spread the word.

https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/docs/partitioned-tables

related feature requests:

• https://code.google.com/p/google-bigquery/issues/detail?id=725
• https://code.google.com/p/google-bigquery/issues/detail?id=712
• https://code.google.com/p/google-bigquery/issues/detail?id=611
• https://code.google.com/p/google-bigquery/issues/detail?id=751

Update * august 2018

Introduction to Clustered Tables - You have now a way to partition by day, and then further cluster your table by any others column(s) such as hour/minute.

Clustering can improve the performance of certain types of queries such as queries that use filter clauses and queries that aggregate data. When data is written to a clustered table by a query job or a load job, BigQuery sorts the data using the values in the clustering columns. These values are used to organize the data into multiple blocks in BigQuery storage. When you submit a query containing a clause that filters data based on the clustering columns, BigQuery uses the sorted blocks to eliminate scans of unnecessary data.