BigQuery

Raised as a usability problem by 9 people on Hacker News over 10 years (2017–2026), in 8 threads.

People raised many different problems with BigQuery, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 9 complaints

Hard to play with and couldn't figure out how to use it2026-02-03
Matching NULLs in joins requires an unobvious, verbose IS NOT DISTINCT FROM spelling2025-01-03
Cost shown in PB units, easy to misread as TB, hiding true charge2024-02-21
Query cost hidden behind abstract TBs-scanned and slots metrics, hard to predict2024-02-20
Parquet uploads store float arrays as nested STRUCT, requiring manual parsing back to arrays2023-12-30
Scanned-data cost estimate sits in an easy-to-miss corner, so users accidentally run expensive queries2023-03-03
Query interface feels incredibly slow and clunky, lacks shortcuts for jumping to tables2022-12-28
Datatype problems across tables made a one-hour job take over six hours2019-04-12
Requires a Google account, so people without one cannot use it2017-09-06