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COLUMNS view

The INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS view contains one row for each column (field) in a table.

Required permissions

To query the INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS view, you need the following Identity and Access Management (IAM) permissions:

Each of the following predefined IAM roles includes the preceding permissions:

For more information about BigQuery permissions, see Access control with IAM.

Schema

When you query the INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS view, the query results contain one row for each column (field) in a table.

The INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS view has the following schema:

Column name Data type Value
table_catalog STRING The project ID of the project that contains the dataset.
table_schema STRING The name of the dataset that contains the table also referred to as the datasetId.
table_name STRING The name of the table or view also referred to as the tableId.
column_name STRING The name of the column.
ordinal_position INT64 The 1-indexed offset of the column within the table; if it's a pseudo column such as _PARTITIONTIME or _PARTITIONDATE, the value is NULL.
is_nullable STRING YES or NO depending on whether the column's mode allows NULL values.
data_type STRING The column's GoogleSQL data type.
is_generated STRING The value is ALWAYS if the column is an automatically generated embedding column; otherwise, the value is NEVER.
generation_expression STRING The value is the generation expression used to define the column if the column is an automatically generated embedding column; otherwise the value is NULL.
is_stored STRING The value is YES if the column is an automatically generated embedding column; otherwise, the value is NULL.
async_generation_status STRUCT Contains blocking errors for background embedding generation jobs if the column is an automatically generated embedding column; otherwise, the value is NULL. For information about blocking errors, see the async_generation_status.blocking_error.message field. Blocking errors can include the following:
  • Permission denied errors
  • Not found errors
  • Unsupported embedding model endpoint errors
  • Vertex AI API not enabled errors
Once the next embedding generation job succeeds, the async_generation_status column is cleared.
is_hidden STRING YES or NO depending on whether the column is a pseudo column such as _PARTITIONTIME or _PARTITIONDATE.
is_updatable STRING The value is always NULL.
is_system_defined STRING YES or NO depending on whether the column is a pseudo column such as _PARTITIONTIME or _PARTITIONDATE.
is_partitioning_column STRING YES or NO depending on whether the column is a partitioning column.
clustering_ordinal_position INT64 The 1-indexed offset of the column within the table's clustering columns; the value is NULL if the table is not a clustered table.
collation_name STRING The name of the collation specification if it exists; otherwise, NULL.

If a STRING or ARRAY<STRING> is passed in, the collation specification is returned if it exists; otherwise NULL is returned.
column_default STRING The default value of the column if it exists; otherwise, the value is NULL.
rounding_mode STRING The mode of rounding that's used for values written to the field if its type is a parameterized NUMERIC or BIGNUMERIC; otherwise, the value is NULL.
data_policies.name STRING The list of data policies that are attached to the column to control access and masking. This field is in (Preview).
policy_tags ARRAY<STRING> The list of policy tags that are attached to the column.

For stability, we recommend that you explicitly list columns in your information schema queries instead of using a wildcard (SELECT *). Explicitly listing columns prevents queries from breaking if the underlying schema changes.

Scope and syntax

Queries against this view must include a dataset or a region qualifier. For queries with a dataset qualifier, you must have permissions for the dataset. For queries with a region qualifier, you must have permissions for the project. For more information see Syntax. The following table explains the region and resource scopes for this view:

View name Resource scope Region scope
[PROJECT_ID.]`region-REGION`.INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS Project level REGION
[PROJECT_ID.]DATASET_ID.INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS Dataset level Dataset location
Replace the following:

Example

The following example retrieves metadata from the INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS view for the population_by_zip_2010 table in the census_bureau_usa dataset. This dataset is part of the BigQuery public dataset program.

Because the table you're querying is in another project, the bigquery-public-data project, you add the project ID to the dataset in the following format: `project_id`.dataset.INFORMATION_SCHEMA.view; for example, `bigquery-public-data`.census_bureau_usa.INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLES.

The following column is excluded from the query results:

Note: INFORMATION_SCHEMA view names are case-sensitive. 
  SELECT
    * EXCEPT(is_updatable)
  FROM
    `bigquery-public-data`.census_bureau_usa.INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS
  WHERE
    table_name = 'population_by_zip_2010';

The result is similar to the following. For readability, some columns are excluded from the result.

+------------------------+-------------+------------------+-------------+-----------+-----------+-------------------+------------------------+-----------------------------+-------------+
|       table_name       | column_name | ordinal_position | is_nullable | data_type | is_hidden | is_system_defined | is_partitioning_column | clustering_ordinal_position | policy_tags |
+------------------------+-------------+------------------+-------------+-----------+-----------+-------------------+------------------------+-----------------------------+-------------+
| population_by_zip_2010 | zipcode     |                1 | NO          | STRING    | NO        | NO                | NO                     |                        NULL | 0 rows      |
| population_by_zip_2010 | geo_id      |                2 | YES         | STRING    | NO        | NO                | NO                     |                        NULL | 0 rows      |
| population_by_zip_2010 | minimum_age |                3 | YES         | INT64     | NO        | NO                | NO                     |                        NULL | 0 rows      |
| population_by_zip_2010 | maximum_age |                4 | YES         | INT64     | NO        | NO                | NO                     |                        NULL | 0 rows      |
| population_by_zip_2010 | gender      |                5 | YES         | STRING    | NO        | NO                | NO                     |                        NULL | 0 rows      |
| population_by_zip_2010 | population  |                6 | YES         | INT64     | NO        | NO                | NO                     |                        NULL | 0 rows      |
+------------------------+-------------+------------------+-------------+-----------+-----------+-------------------+------------------------+-----------------------------+-------------+

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Last updated 2026-08-11 UTC.

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