BigQuery: Response too large to return when using

Question

The table I am working with has 3 fields:

userId, timestamp, version

I am running the following query:

select  userid, MAX(version) as current_version FROM  my_table GROUP EACH BY userId;

The response I get is:

"errors": [
 {
  "reason": "responseTooLarge",
  "message": "Response too large to return."
 }

The size of the table is 644MB and it has 12,279,432 rows.

I thought GROUP EACH BY does not have the result size restrictions because it is distributed across multiple nodes. Anyway, What can I do about it?

Answer 1

According to the comments, the user base is over 17 million rows? This means the query response will have at least 17 million rows, a result too large to handle.

The right query will depend on what your goal is. Do you really want to get a 17 million row answer? Or you only care about the max(version) for a particular set of users?

For example:

SELECT userid, MAX(version) AS current_version
FROM my_table
WHERE userId IN('user1', 'user2', ...)
GROUP BY userId;