How do I edit field type in my BigQuery Schema?

[ramyofficial]

One of the fields I use in BigQuery has changed, I was using Unix/Epoch timestamp and it caused issues on another system integrated into BigQuery. So I have edited that field on the table to be an ISO 8601 date like "2023-11-17T18:54:37Z"

Unfortunately, the way BigQuery reads the data according to the schema, it returns "2023" and ignores the rest.

I just want to make a change to the schema which currently identifies that field type as "INTEGER" and I want to change to "STRING" I see absolutely no way to do it - I press "edit schema" and there's no way to change anything and I am the project owner there are no more permissions for me to add.

[SanketK]

Hi @ramyofficial ,

Have you tried the steps mentioned here? 

https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/docs/managing-table-schemas#change_a_columns_data_type 

I do not think it is possible via the GC Console, hence please refer this doc and try the steps.

Kind Regards,

SanketK

[ramyofficial]

Thank you I will take a look, I am pretty sure I read this documentation and it provided a few options, but none of them seem to work because my table is considered an external table. I wish it was easier to simply edit the schema, considering there’s a button that says “edit schema”, but then there’s no functionality beyond that.