Efficiently write a Pandas dataframe to Google BigQuery

Question

I'm trying to upload a pandas.DataFrame to google big query using the pandas.DataFrame.to_gbq() function documented here. The problem is that to_gbq() takes 2.3 minutes while uploading directly to Google Cloud Storage GUI takes less than a minute. I'm planing to upload a bunch of dataframes (~32) each one with a similar size, so i want to know what its the faster alternative.

This is the script that i'm using:

dataframe.to_gbq('my_dataset.my_table', 
                 'my_project_id',
                 chunksize=None, # i've tryed with several chunksizes, it runs faster when is one big chunk (at least for me)
                 if_exists='append',
                 verbose=False
                 )

dataframe.to_csv(str(month) + '_file.csv') # the file size its 37.3 MB, this takes almost 2 seconds 
# manually upload the file into GCS GUI
print(dataframe.shape)
(363364, 21)

my question is, what is faster?

1. Upload Dataframe using pandas.DataFrame.to_gbq() function
2. Saving Dataframe as csv and then upload as a file to BigQuery using the Python API
3. Saving Dataframe as csv and then upload the file to Google Cloud Storage using this procedure and then reading it from BigQuery

update:

alternative 2, using pd.DataFrame.to_csv() and load_data_from_file() seems to take longer than alternative 1 ( 17.9 sec more in average with 3 loops):

def load_data_from_file(dataset_id, table_id, source_file_name):
    bigquery_client = bigquery.Client()
    dataset_ref = bigquery_client.dataset(dataset_id)
    table_ref = dataset_ref.table(table_id)

    with open(source_file_name, 'rb') as source_file:
        # This example uses CSV, but you can use other formats.
        # See https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/loading-data
        job_config = bigquery.LoadJobConfig()
        job_config.source_format = 'text/csv'
        job_config.autodetect=True
        job = bigquery_client.load_table_from_file(
            source_file, table_ref, job_config=job_config)

    job.result()  # Waits for job to complete

    print('Loaded {} rows into {}:{}.'.format(
        job.output_rows, dataset_id, table_id))

thank you!

Answer 1

I did the comparison for alternative 1 and 3 in Datalab using the following code:

from datalab.context import Context
import datalab.storage as storage
import datalab.bigquery as bq
import pandas as pd
from pandas import DataFrame
import time

# Dataframe to write
my_data = [{1,2,3}]
for i in range(0,100000):
    my_data.append({1,2,3})
not_so_simple_dataframe = pd.DataFrame(data=my_data,columns=['a','b','c'])

#Alternative 1
start = time.time()
not_so_simple_dataframe.to_gbq('TestDataSet.TestTable', 
                 Context.default().project_id,
                 chunksize=10000, 
                 if_exists='append',
                 verbose=False
                 )
end = time.time()
print("time alternative 1 " + str(end - start))

#Alternative 3
start = time.time()
sample_bucket_name = Context.default().project_id + '-datalab-example'
sample_bucket_path = 'gs://' + sample_bucket_name
sample_bucket_object = sample_bucket_path + '/Hello.txt'
bigquery_dataset_name = 'TestDataSet'
bigquery_table_name = 'TestTable'

# Define storage bucket
sample_bucket = storage.Bucket(sample_bucket_name)

# Create or overwrite the existing table if it exists
table_schema = bq.Schema.from_dataframe(not_so_simple_dataframe)

# Write the DataFrame to GCS (Google Cloud Storage)
%storage write --variable not_so_simple_dataframe --object $sample_bucket_object

# Write the DataFrame to a BigQuery table
table.insert_data(not_so_simple_dataframe)
end = time.time()
print("time alternative 3 " + str(end - start))

and here are the results for n = {10000,100000,1000000}:

n       alternative_1  alternative_3
10000   30.72s         8.14s
100000  162.43s        70.64s
1000000 1473.57s       688.59s

Judging from the results, alternative 3 is faster than alternative 1.