How to create temporary table in Google BigQuery

2018 update - definitive answer with DDL

With BigQuery's DDL support you can create a table from the results a query - and specify its expiration at creation time. For example, for 3 days:

#standardSQL
CREATE TABLE `fh-bigquery.public_dump.vtemp`
OPTIONS(
  expiration_timestamp=TIMESTAMP_ADD(CURRENT_TIMESTAMP(), INTERVAL 3 DAY)
) AS
SELECT corpus, COUNT(*) c
FROM `bigquery-public-data.samples.shakespeare`
GROUP BY corpus

• Docs: https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/docs/data-definition-language

2019 update -- With BigQuery scripting (Beta now), CREATE TEMP TABLE is officially supported. See public documentation here.

2018 update: https://stackoverflow.com/a/50227484/132438

Every query in bigquery creates a temporary table with the results. Temporary unless you give a name to the destination table, then you are in control of its lifecycle.

Use the api to see the temporary table name, or name your tables when querying.

A temporary table can be created with WITH in the "New Standard SQL". See WITH clause.

An example given by Google:

WITH subQ1 AS (SELECT SchoolID FROM Roster),
     subQ2 AS (SELECT OpponentID FROM PlayerStats)
SELECT * FROM subQ1
UNION ALL
SELECT * FROM subQ2;

2019 update -- With BigQuery scripting, CREATE TEMP TABLE is officially supported. See public documentation here.

CREATE TEMP TABLE Example
(
  x INT64,
  y STRING
);

INSERT INTO Example
VALUES (5, 'foo');

INSERT INTO Example
VALUES (6, 'bar');

SELECT *
FROM Example;