Partitioning and clustering

Status: shipped.

Partitioning

Three partitioning schemes, all fully supported:

• Time-unit partitioning: HOUR / DAY / MONTH / YEAR on a DATE / TIMESTAMP / DATETIME column.
• Ingestion-time partitioning: partition by server write time (exposed via _PARTITIONTIME / _PARTITIONDATE).
• Integer-range partitioning: fixed-width buckets over an INT64 column.

Partition pruning is applied in the SQL rewriter via WHERE-clause inspection.

Clustering

Up to four clustering columns, physically realized via DuckDB's SORT at write time. Clustering is a storage optimization — queries produce identical results regardless; only scan behavior changes.

Require partition filter

Tables with require_partition_filter = true reject queries that cannot be pruned to a subset of partitions; the error surfaces as a BigQuery invalidQuery response with the canonical "Cannot query over table without a filter that can be used for partition elimination" message.