Question

The BigQuery Browser tool documentation mentions the limit on CSV exports:

If a query result set has fewer than 16,000 rows, you can download it
as a CSV file.

We’ve tried this feature and the limit appears to be much smaller than 16,000 rows. Using this query:

SELECT 
  contract_id,
  product,
  AVG(element_value)
FROM [******.payout]
GROUP BY contract_id, product
LIMIT 600;

The UI responds with an error:

This result set contains too many rows for direct download. Please use
“Save as Table” and then export…

If I reduce the LIMIT to 500, then the CSV download works.

Can you please confirm the actual row limit. Is the documentation out of date, or is this a bug in the query interface?

Answer 1

This is a bug in the UI — download as CSV should work with up to 16k rows (or 10 MB of results). This has been fixed internally and the fix should go out with next week’s release.