Exploring the BigQuery Query History

Here’s a BigQuery trick I use all the time—seriously, not saying this to make my post catchier 😁.

It’s not flashy or very complicated, but it’s one of my favorites: Job History.

Under the Query Editor, you’ll find Job History, which stores all past queries—either your own (Personal History) or those run by others in the project (Project History).

🔍 Why is this useful?

✅ Quickly find queries you forgot to save.

✅ Filter by date, SQL definition (summary), or user to track down past work.

✅ For recent queries, you might even retrieve results from the temporary table—saving you from rerunning expensive queries.

This has saved me so many times after accidentally closing a query tab. (Just remember: if you never executed the query, it won’t be there!)

Also, please be reminded that the job data is also available via an INFORMATION SCHEMA view (check out the comments for a post about that one).

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