How to query a column named “OR” in BigQuery?

Question

We unfortunately have a table with a column that has been written with the field name of "OR".

If we try to query this table - "SELECT OR FROM etc." we get an error because OR is a reserved word.

How do we query that column using BigQuery's legacy SQL queries? (We need that column and not others.)

We thought we could use "SELECT *" and BigQuery's "exclude" feature but isn't part of legacy SQL so we are unable to use it. Other ideas?

Answer 1

I ran into this issue when querying the Hacker News dataset. It appears the authors added a "by" column because they were replicating the API response keys . However, it's difficult to query and not best practice in database design .

I tried the brackets:

SELECT
   [by] as author_name
FROM
   `bigquery-public-data.hacker_news.full`
LIMIT
   1000

but received the following error:

Syntax error: Unexpected keyword BY at [2:4]

Here is a query that works on the Hacker News dataset in BigQuery with Standard SQL Dialect:

SELECT
  b.by as author_name
FROM
  `bigquery-public-data.hacker_news.full` as b
LIMIT
  1000

Answer 2

We found another SO answer for this - except you need to do something additional to what they describe. You cannot just add brackets to the name - you also need to give it a new column name.

The answer is to query like this:

SELECT [OR] AS new_column_name FROM ...

Answer 3

I know that you're looking for an answer using legacy SQL (and you found one using the bracket syntax), but for future readers, or , and , etc. are valid column names for query results in standard SQL . The following query will not return an error, for instance:

WITH T AS (
  SELECT
    1 AS `or`,
    2 AS `and`
)
SELECT * FROM T;