How to make sure your GA4 events tables do not expire

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When you link GA4 to BigQuery in the sandbox environment (without a credit card or billing account), it “just works”.

But.. the analytics dataset will be configured to automatically expire after 60 days, even if you have added a credit card later!

Here’s how to undo the expiry of your analytics dataset and event tables:

Step 1: Unset the expiry of your analytics_nnnn dataset

Navigate to your dataset, and click “Edit Details”.

Then, un-select the Enable table expiry box and click SAVE.

Now, all the new tables in this set will have expiry set to Never.

Step 2: alter your existing event table shards to they won’t expire

If you have 60 days of events, you need to EDIT the details of all 60 daily tables manually.

Option 1: manually click all tables. That’s a lot of clicking.

Click.. select date, click.. edit details, click… “None”, click.. SAVE.

Option 2: type an “ALTER TABLE” statement.

One per table shard:

ALTER TABLE projectname.analytics_nnnnn.events_20230725 SET OPTIONS(expiration_timestamp=null)

To speed this up, you can use this alter table shard to unset expiry generator and use the output.

The following code will unset expiry for shards 62 days ago until today

Unset 60 days of expiry Project name:
Dataset name:

Refresh

Copy-paste this code into a new query and run.