BigQuery SQL use description of table for a description of a view

Question

I'm creating a view of a table that I have in BigQuery.

How can I get the description of the table and make it the description of the view?

Answer 1

You can do this using INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLE_OPTIONS to get the table description and set it to a variable.

Working example:

-- declare variable where we will later write the table description to
DECLARE view_description STRING;

-- create an example table that has a description
CREATE OR REPLACE TABLE `your_project.your_dataset.test_table_descriptions`
OPTIONS(description="Interesting table description")
AS SELECT 1 test_column;

-- get the table description and write it to the view_description variable
SET view_description = (
    SELECT option_value
    FROM `your_project.your_dataset.INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLE_OPTIONS`
    WHERE table_name = 'test_table_descriptions' and option_name = 'description');

-- create the view you want and within options use the view_description variable
CREATE OR REPLACE VIEW `your_project.your_dataset.test_table_descriptions2`
OPTIONS(description=(view_description))
AS SELECT 1 test_column_of_view;

More info on INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLE_OPTIONS :
https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/docs/information-schema-tables#table_options_view