Metabase and Bigquery - handling nulls

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Hi Everyone,

I’ve just started working with Metabase and Bigquery. Really enjoying the software, so big thanks to all the contributors.

One of the issues I’m facing is working with BigQuery. I’ve tried to run some simple reports i.e. summing up the “revenue” column and I get a lot of errors i.e. “java.lang.NullPointerException”.

My assumptions is that this happens because one of the columns in the table contains a “null” value. My question is, if this is a bug or expected behavior? I’m summing up a column that does not contain any “nulls” and the query works fine in the BigQuery SQL(sum). Should I work on some data pipeline that would replace the NULLs with empty values or so? Would be great to get some feedback from the team to understand the recommended workflow.

NB I’m working on v0.31.2, but we can update. I didn’t see any improvements for this issue in the release notes.

Thanks a lot,

Tomasz

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Hi @tomaszmazur
Almost all the database drivers got an upgrade in 0.32, so it would be great if you could check if anything has changed (or maybe the logging is better in the newer versions).
I don’t have BigQuery, but it seems like there’s a couple of open issues, which are having similar problem, but they haven’t been updated for some time:
https://github.com/metabase/metabase/issues?utf8=✓&q=is%3Aissue+bigquery+NullPointerException

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Hi @flamber, thanks a lot for getting back to me. The upgrade went fine and the issue with NULLs is fixed now. I think you can recommend other users to upgrade the software to fix the problem. Thanks again!

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