BigQuery table partition

Question

I have table for e.g emp which is not partitioned and contains 200TB of data. I want to create partition table from emp table but it should have name emp only. To do that i have to first create partition table emp_1 from emp table then drop emp then create emp from emp_1 This way have to load 200 TB two times. Is there any alternate solution?

Answer 1

You can copy emp to emp_1. Copy job is a metadata only operation, which is fast and free. Then you can drop emp and re-create as partitioned table, then load the data from emp_1 to emp.