I'm ashamed to ask such a basic question but, here goes. I'm trying to change the datatype of a column in a saved table in Birquery. The SQL format I'm familiar with is "Alter Table TABLENAME Alter Column COLUMN NAME NEW COLUMN TYPE; (i.e., Alter Table Mytable Alter Column bike_id string"; Bigquery won't process this and tells me it's looking for either a "Drop", or "Set" keyword. What am I doing wrong. Thanks for the help.
According to BigQuery documentation, that's not possible with a DDL statement:
All other schema modifications are unsupported and require manual workarounds, including:
- Changing a column's name
- Changing a column's data type
- Changing a column's mode (aside from relaxing
REQUIREDcolumns toNULLABLE)
https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/docs/managing-table-schemas
They suggest some workarounds here: https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/docs/manually-changing-schemas
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