BigQuery and warehouse access
Warehouse access gives your organisation a read-only BigQuery dataset that holds only your own data — for a BI tool, not for ad-hoc human queries in the portal.
What it is
A nightly job (03:30 UK) exports your surveys, work orders, audit events and notifications into a shared analytics warehouse, one row per record, tagged with your organisation id. Enabling warehouse access provisions a dataset scoped to your organisation alone — a set of authorised views that can only ever see rows carrying your organisation id, never another tenant’s — plus a read-only service account with a key returned to you once. Your BI tool queries that dataset directly; it never touches the shared base tables.
Before you start
Warehouse access requires the Platform plan and organisation-admin access to Settings.
How to do it
- Open Settings → Data & exports.
- Under Analytics warehouse (BigQuery), click Enable warehouse access.
- Copy the connection details and the service-account key shown — the key is returned once and cannot be retrieved again.
- Add the service account to your BI tool (Looker Studio, Power BI, or anything that can authenticate against BigQuery with a service-account key) and point it at the dataset shown.
- Query away — the underlying export refreshes automatically every night, so yesterday’s data is available from the morning after.
How it integrates
The isolation is structural, not a filter your query has to remember to apply: a query run with your service account can only ever reach your own dataset’s views, and those views can only ever see rows tagged with your own organisation id — there is no code path, correct or buggy, by which your account can read another tenant’s rows. The nightly export itself is additive: a run reads only records touched since the previous run, and the table schema only ever grows new nullable columns, never removes or renames one an existing dashboard already reads.
Common problems
- I lost the service-account key. It’s shown once and can’t be retrieved again — disable and re-enable warehouse access to get a fresh one.
- Yesterday’s data isn’t showing yet. The export runs once nightly (03:30 UK) — there is no on-demand refresh.
- The section shows an upgrade notice instead of the controls. BigQuery warehouse access is a Platform-plan feature.