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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-07T10:55:44+00:00

Im using Google BigQuery and have a questions of the POSITION(field) function that it

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Im using Google BigQuery and have a questions of the POSITION(field) function that it provides.

I thought the POSITION function returns a position of the value in query within the nested field.

But i’m quite surprised that it also works on non-nested fields.

eg. 

SELECT url, POSITION(url) FROM [publicdata:samples.github_timeline] WHERE url="https://github.com/oscardelben/sheet";

and the output is 

Row  url                                 f0_
1  https://github.com/oscardelben/sheet  1
2  https://github.com/oscardelben/sheet  2
3  https://github.com/oscardelben/sheet  3
4  https://github.com/oscardelben/sheet  4
5  https://github.com/oscardelben/sheet  5
6  https://github.com/oscardelben/sheet  6
7  https://github.com/oscardelben/sheet  1
8  https://github.com/oscardelben/sheet  2
9  https://github.com/oscardelben/sheet  3
....
...
..
.

in this context, what does POSITION(url) mean?
also are there any nested field provided by the Google BigQuery samples that I can test with?

I appreciate yo

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    From what I can tell, for a non-nested field, POSITION will return the row offset in the data shard — that is, if the underlying data is split into 100 pieces, and your result has 10 rows per each piece, you would have position values of 1-10 repeated 100 times. This is unlikely to be particularly useful. Arguably, this should return the global position (that is, it would return 1-1000 in the above case), and if you agree, let me know and I’ll see if it can be changed.

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