BigQuery UDF Internal Error

Question

We had a simple UDF in BigQuery that somehow throws an error that keeps returning

Query Failed
Error: An internal error occurred and the request could not be co         


        

Answer 1

Short answer - this is an issue related to memory allocation that I uncovered via my own testing and fixed today, but it will take a little while to flow out to production.

Slightly longer answer - we just rolled out a fix today for an issue where users who were having "out of memory" issues when scaling up their UDFs over larger number of rows, even though the UDF would succeed on smaller numbers of rows. The queries that were hitting that condition are now running fine on our internal / test trees. However, since public BigQuery hosts have much higher traffic loads, the JavaScript engine that executes the UDFs (V8) behaves somewhat differently in production than it does in internal trees. Specifically, there's a new memory allocation error that some of the previously OOMing jobs are now hitting that we couldn't observe until the queries ran on a fully-loaded tree.

It's a minor error with a quick fix, but we'd ideally let it flow through our regular testing and QA cycle. This should put the fix in production in about a week, assuming nothing else goes wrong with the candidate. Would that be acceptable for you?