Question

A data engineering team owns a BigQuery scheduled query that materializes a nightly reporting table. The query was originally created by an engineer who has since left the company; when her user account was deactivated, the scheduled query began failing with authentication errors. The team wants the pipeline to keep running reliably regardless of employee turnover, while following Google-recommended practices. What should they do?

Accepted Answer

Configure the scheduled query to run as a service account that has the required BigQuery permissions, and grant the team the ability to manage that service account.

Answer

Recreate the scheduled query under a shared team member's personal Google account so multiple people can maintain it.

Answer

Move the logic into a Cloud Scheduler cron job that triggers the query using the departed engineer's cached OAuth token.

Answer

Grant the BigQuery Data Editor role to the allUsers principal on the destination dataset so the query no longer needs authentication.