Question

Your data analytics team runs BigQuery workloads that have grown unpredictably. Finance reports that on-demand query costs have tripled over three months, with large spikes during monthly reporting cycles but low steady usage otherwise. A few ad-hoc analyst queries occasionally scan enormous tables and cause bill surprises. You must implement a FinOps approach that controls cost while keeping predictable baseline performance for scheduled reporting jobs. What should you do?

Accepted Answer

Purchase a baseline slot commitment (editions with autoscaling) to cover steady reporting load, assign the reporting jobs to a dedicated reservation, and leave ad-hoc analyst queries on on-demand with per-project/per-user maximum bytes-billed limits.

Answer

Move all workloads to on-demand pricing and set an organization-wide monthly billing budget alert to cap spending.

Answer

Purchase a single large flat-rate slot commitment sized to the monthly reporting peak and route every query—scheduled and ad-hoc—through that one reservation.

Answer

Export all datasets to Cloud Storage and query them with external tables to avoid BigQuery compute charges entirely.