Querying Iceberg Table and its history

[saif3r]

I have few tables setup according to this guide: https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/docs/iceberg-tables and this codebase: https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/data-analytics-golden-demo

Tables work, I can query them using SELECT * FROM table, but I wonder how do I access Time Travel feature? E.g. in Athena, I would just query SELECT * FROM table$history, pick the commit id and then just run SELECT * FROM table FOR VERSION AS OF 949530903748831860. How do I do that via BigQuery? How to use time travel feature here?

Thank you.

[kolban · Accepted solution]

To the best of my knowledge, time travel when querying BigQuery tables will only work if the data for the tables is owned by BigQuery.  When you create tables in BigQuery where the storage (content) of the table exists outside of BigQuery (eg. Iceberg format files) then the data is not managed by BigQuery and you will not have time travel available to you.