Developers can effortlessly connect, interact, and generate data insights with BigQuery datasets and data using natural language commands.

Learn more about Gemini CLI Extensions.

• Natural Language to insights : Ask a variety of questions from your BigQuery data and generate intelligent insights.
• Seamless Workflow: Stay in your CLI. No need to constantly switch contexts to the GCP console for generating analytics insights. .
• Leverage prebuilt agent : Access to advanced insights offered by a built-in agent behind Conversational Analytics API

Before you begin, ensure you have the following:

• Gemini CLI installed with version +v0.6.0.
• Setup Gemini CLI Authentication.
• A Google Cloud project with the Data Analytics API with Gemini, Gemini for Google Cloud API and BigQuery API enabled.
• Ensure Application Default Credentials are available in your environment.
• IAM Roles:
  • BigQuery User (roles/bigquery.user) (for executing queries and view metadata)
  • Gemini for Google Cloud (roles/cloudaicompanion.user) (to use the conversational analytics API)

To install the extension, use the command:

gemini extensions install https://github.com/gemini-cli-extensions/bigquery-conversational-analytics

Set the following environment variables before starting the Gemini CLI. These variables can be loaded from a .env file.

export BIGQUERY_PROJECT="<your-gcp-project-id>" export BIGQUERY_LOCATION="<your-dataset-location>" # Optional export BIGQUERY_USE_CLIENT_OAUTH="true" # Optional

Ensure Application Default Credentials are available in your environment.

To start the Gemini CLI, use the following command:

gemini

Interact with BigQuery using natural language right from your IDE:

• Ask for insights

  • Using the tables under bigquery-public-data.google_analytics_sample , tell me the channels I should focus on and why?

This extension provides a comprehensive set of tools:

• ask_data_insights: Perform data analysis, get insights, or answer complex questions about the contents of specific BigQuery tables.
• search_catalog: Find BigQuery tables relevant to users, natural language query.

Find additional extensions to support your entire software development lifecycle at github.com/gemini-cli-extensions, including:

• BigQuery Data Analytics
• and more!

Use gemini --debug to enable debugging.

Common issues:

• "failed to find default credentials: google: could not find default credentials.": Ensure Application Default Credentials are available in your environment. See Set up Application Default Credentials for more information.
• "✖ Error during discovery for server: MCP error -32000: Connection closed": The database connection has not been established. Ensure your configuration is set via environment variables.
• "✖ MCP ERROR: Error: spawn /Users/USER/.gemini/extensions/bigquery-conversational-analytics/toolbox ENOENT": The Toolbox binary did not download correctly. Ensure you are using Gemini CLI v0.6.0+.
• "cannot execute binary file": The Toolbox binary did not download correctly. Ensure the correct binary for your OS/Architecture has been downloaded. See Installing the server for more information.