If you want to utilize BigQuery’s INFORMATION_SCHEMA tables as a source, it’s relatively straightforward. You just set it as any other table way with a region prefix, ensuring you include the region prefix.

INFORMATION_SCHEMA in source.yml

sources:
- name: gcp
  schema: region-us.INFORMATION_SCHEMA
  tables:
  - JOBS_BY_FOLDER
  - JOBS_BY_PROJECT
  - ...
  - JOBS

Issues, errors?

In generated documentation with dbt docs everything seems to be in place. Although, each execution produces DatabaseError about incorrect project_id format. I didn’t find any other alternative way how to write it down.

Solution

The workaround, I came up with, is executing compilation separately before as:

dbt compile
dbt docs generate --no-compile

Don’t know whether this is graceful enough, but at least don’t produce hundreds of errors in BigQuery’s job history. Especially helpful, if you generate documentation very often.