Using UI by 2018-10-29
If you want to do it from the UI. Go to bigquery, at the left click on your
project -> dataset -> at the right click on cleater Table
Fill the rest of the information
- Create table from: Google Cloud Storage
- Select from GCS bucket: path to your database location on GCS
- File format: JSON
- Under the schema section click auto detect schema
That should do the work using the new UI by 2018-10-29
Using CLI
You can do it from google console as well using bigquery CLI like
bq mk --external_table_definition=gs://yourbucket/path/yourdb --destination_format NEWLINE_DELIMITED_JSON --autodetect yourdataset.yourtablename
Last arguments is your dataset name dot your table name.
You don't need to specify a file, you can point to a folder. About compression, from BigQuery documentation
If you use gzip compression BigQuery cannot read the data in parallel.
Loading compressed JSON data into BigQuery is slower than loading
uncompressed data.
So it is supported, but not recommended from a performance point of view due the limitations of the gz format, Anyway if should have several small files, it shouldn't matter, I think it is more related to big files gziped.
EDIT:
If you need to point multiple files, you can use wildcard like --external_table_definition=gs://yourbucket/path/yourdb/*