Load geojson in bigquery - json

Question

What is the best way to load the following geojson file in Google Big Query?
http://storage.googleapis.com/velibs/stations/test.json
I have a lot of json files like this (much bigger) on Google Storage, and I cannot download/modify/upload them all (it would take forever). Note that the file is not newline-delimited, so I guess it needs to be modified online.
Thanks all.

Answer 1

Step by step 2019:
If you get the error "Error while reading data, error message: JSON parsing error in row starting at position 0: Nested arrays not allowed.", you might have a GeoJSON file.
Transform GeoJSON into new-line delimited JSON with jq, load as CSV into BigQuery:
jq -c .features[] \
san_francisco_censustracts.json > sf_censustracts_201905.json
bq load --source_format=CSV \
--quote='' --field_delimiter='|' \
fh-bigquery:deleting.sf_censustracts_201905 \
sf_censustracts_201905.json row
Parse the loaded file in BigQuery:
CREATE OR REPLACE TABLE `fh-bigquery.uber_201905.sf_censustracts`
AS
SELECT FORMAT('%f,%f', ST_Y(centroid), ST_X(centroid)) lat_lon, *
FROM (
SELECT *, ST_CENTROID(geometry) centroid
FROM (
SELECT
CAST(JSON_EXTRACT_SCALAR(row, '$.properties.MOVEMENT_ID') AS INT64) movement_id
, JSON_EXTRACT_SCALAR(row, '$.properties.DISPLAY_NAME') display_name
, ST_GeogFromGeoJson(JSON_EXTRACT(row, '$.geometry')) geometry
FROM `fh-bigquery.deleting.sf_censustracts_201905`
)
)
Alternative approaches:
With ogr2ogr:
https://medium.com/google-cloud/how-to-load-geographic-data-like-zipcode-boundaries-into-bigquery-25e4be4391c8
https://medium.com/#mentin/loading-large-spatial-features-to-bigquery-geography-2f6ceb6796df
With Node.js:
https://github.com/mentin/geoscripts/blob/master/geojson2bq/geojson2bqjson.js

Answer 2

The bucket in the question no longer exists.... However five years later there is a new answer.
In July 2018, Google announced an alpha (now beta) of BigQuery GIS.
The docs highlight a limitation that
BigQuery GIS supports only individual geometry objects in GeoJSON.
BigQuery GIS does not currently support GeoJSON feature objects,
feature collections, or the GeoJSON file format.
This means that any Feature of Feature Collection properties would need to be added to separate columns, with a geography column to hold the geojson geography.
In this tutorial by a Google trainer, polygons in a shape file are converted into geojson strings inside rows of a CSV file using gdal.
ogr2ogr -f csv -dialect sqlite -sql "select AsGeoJSON(geometry) AS geom, * from LAYER_NAME" output.csv inputfilename.shp
You want to end up with one column with the geometry content like this
{"type":"Polygon","coordinates":[[....]]}
Other columns may contain feature properties.
The CSV can then be imported to BQ. Then a query on the table can be viewed in BigQuery Geo Viz. You need to tell it which column contains the geometry.