IssueTracker

Using the Java API to insert data directly after a table has been created often fails. For it to work I must wait "a while" after it has been created (sleeping 5 seconds makes it work about 30% of the time). This issue has been observed also on StackOverflow:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/36415265/after-recreating-bigquery-table-streaming-inserts-are-not-working
and
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/46889625/streaming-data-into-bigquery-fresh-new-table

Problem you have encountered:
A NOT FOUND error message is thrown e.g: Table 61605904359:matrixbq.mtcars not found.

What you expected to happen:
Data to be inserted successfully.

Steps to reproduce:
run the code described in https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/docs/samples/bigquery-inserting-data-types

Other information (workarounds you have tried, documentation consulted, etc):
Checking if the table exists does not mean it is possible to insert data. The following method returns true even when the insert fails:
boolean tableExist(String datasetName, String tableName) {
    def table = bigQuery.getTable(TableId.of(datasetName, tableName))
    if (table != null && table.exists()) {
      return true
    }
    return false
  }

My current workaround that seems to to be working is to do as follows:
     createTable(matrix, datasetName)
    Thread.sleep(5000)
    while(true) {
      try {
        insert(matrix, tableId)
        break
      } catch (BigQueryException e) {
        if (e.code != 404) {
          throw e
        }
        println("Table is not ready for insert, sleeping for 5 seconds")
        Thread.sleep(5000)
      }
    }

The API could be "fixed" by adding an optional boolean flag to wait on create fro the table to be ready to receive data i.e; bigQuery.create(tableInfo, true). Another way would be to add an api call for status (if its insertable) and then build some polling and sleep logic on the client side which would be slightly cleaner than catching exceptions and retrying as in the workaround described.