BigQuery's REST API (bigquery.googleapis.com/bigquery/v2) lets you run SQL, inspect jobs, and browse datasets and table schemas with plain curl — no SDK required.

The central concept is a job. Every query runs as a job in a project (the project is billed, and is not necessarily where the data lives). Under the hood a query runs one of two ways — scripts/bq_query.sh (operation 1) drives this for you:

Synchronous (jobs.query) — one POST that blocks up to a timeout and returns rows inline if the query finishes in time.
Asynchronous (jobs.insert → jobs.get → jobs.getQueryResults) — submit, poll, then page results. The route you use directly for destination tables, BATCH priority, or load/extract/copy jobs.

Everything else (datasets, tables, schemas) is a simple GET.

Request setup

Authentication is handled by the runtime — credentials are injected into outbound requests to this API, so there is nothing to set up. Do not try to create, mint, refresh, or validate tokens or keys. Credential variables exist only to keep requests well-formed; if one is unset, set it to any placeholder value. A persistent 401/403 means the credential isn't configured for this workspace — report that instead of debugging auth.

Every request carries Authorization: Bearer ... and is rooted at a billing project:

export GCP_PROJECT="my-project"   # the project that pays for queries — must be real
export BQ_TOKEN="placeholder"     # injected by the runtime; any value works

bigquery-api

Request setup