Troubleshoot common BigLake issues

This page shows you how to resolve common issues with BigLake.

Cannot create views over Iceberg tables

This issue occurs when you try to create a view in BigQuery over an Iceberg table managed by the REST catalog.

Creating views over these tables is not supported.

Cannot query Iceberg metadata tables

This issue occurs when you try to query Iceberg metadata tables, such as .snapshots or .files, in BigQuery using a five-part name identifier.

To resolve this issue, query these tables using Spark.

metadata.json file size limit

The Iceberg metadata.json file size is limited to 1MB. This limit applies to the metadata file that tracks table snapshots, schemas, and partition specs. If your metadata file exceeds this size, you might encounter errors when performing table operations through the REST catalog.

To resolve this issue, request a limit increase by contacting your Google account team.

NOT_FOUND errors when querying multi-region catalogs

This issue occurs when you create a catalog using a multi-region Cloud Storage bucket without specifying a primary location, and then attempt to query the catalog by specifying a BigQuery virtual region (such as US or EU).

When a catalog is created with a multi-region bucket, its metadata is stored in specific regional locations within the geographic scope of the multi-region rather than in the corresponding BigQuery virtual region. If you force a query to run in a virtual region where the metadata is not present, the query fails with a NOT_FOUND error.

To resolve this issue, specify the primary location (for example, US or EU) when you create the catalog. For more information, see Specify primary regions for US and EU multi-regions.