Navigating resources

The left sidebar lists every BigQuery project you added, down to the table. Expand, search, open a table's details, or right-click for the actions that apply to it — without leaving the editor.

What is in the tree

The Projects section holds the BigQuery projects you added in Settings. Under each project: datasets; under each dataset: tables, views, materialized views, external tables, routines and property graphs, each with its own icon.

Two kinds of entries are grouped rather than listed one by one:

• Date-sharded tables — events_20240101, events_20240102, … appear as one node, events (412). The suffix must look like a date (YYYYMMDD, YYYYMM or YYYYMMDDHH); calibration_70 stays a plain table. See GA4 events.
• GA4 export datasets — analytics_<property id> gets the Google Analytics icon and a tooltip, plus extra menu items.

Above the tree, Workspace lists your open tabs. Favorites appears when you pin a tab (up to 8) — it is a tabs feature, not a tree one; see Tabs.

Expanding and opening

• Click a project or dataset to expand it.
• Click a table, view or routine to open its entity tab.
• ⌘-click (Ctrl-click on Windows and Linux) copies the full ID, e.g. querylab-io-demo.MotHistoryData.dim_vehicle.
• Right-click, or click the ⋯ button that appears on hover, to open the context menu.
• Drag a table into the editor to insert its ID at the cursor.

Metadata is fetched lazily: a dataset’s tables load when you expand it, a table’s schema when you open it. Expanding a project with a thousand tables is cheap; the expensive calls happen per table, on demand.

Searching the tree

The Search field at the top of the sidebar filters the tree in place. Matching is case-insensitive substring first (vehic finds dim_vehicle); when nothing matches, it falls back to fuzzy matching. Results expand to the matches across every loaded project; clearing the field restores the expansion state you had before.

Only loaded metadata is searched. If a dataset was never expanded, its tables are not in the index yet — expand it, or use the command palette.

⌘K (CtrlK) opens the command palette — Search tables, datasets, tabs, and actions… — which searches across the schema, your open tabs and app commands, and opens the selected table’s tab on Enter.

Refreshing after changes outside the app

Querylab.io caches schema metadata in the browser. When a table was created, dropped or altered outside the app:

• Refresh projects (the circular-arrow button next to the search field) clears the cache and reloads the whole tree.
• Refresh in a project’s or dataset’s context menu reloads just that subtree.
• Refresh in an entity tab’s toolbar reloads one table.

Hiding the sidebar

The Hide Sidebar button (right of the search field) collapses the sidebar to a narrow rail with a search icon; Show Sidebar brings it back. To keep the sidebar but drop the tree, turn off Settings → General → Sidebar → Show data browser tree; the search field then opens the command palette instead of filtering.

What the context menu offers

Items depend on what you right-clicked. Items that generate SQL open it in a new tab.

On tables, datasets and projects:

• Show Details opens the entity tab.
• Copy ID puts the full dotted ID on the clipboard.
• Bulk Generate copies, clones, moves, drops or truncates many tables in one script. See Bulk operations.
• SQL Templates opens the template picker for this entity. See DDL operations.

On tables only:

• Compare opens a compare tab with this table as one side.
• Export sends the table to Google Sheets, CSV, Excel and more.

On tables and datasets, Import opens the import tab with project and dataset pre-filled.

On datasets and projects, Refresh reloads that subtree.

On projects only, CREATE Dataset copies a CREATE SCHEMA statement.

On GA4 datasets, GA4 Templates and GA4 Model Generator are described in GA4 events.