Question

Your data team runs BigQuery on a slot-based reservation with editions pricing. Nightly ETL workloads require a consistent minimum of 500 slots to meet SLAs, but they occasionally spike to 1,500 slots during month-end processing. During the day, ad hoc BI queries are unpredictable and light. You want to guarantee the ETL baseline capacity at the lowest committed cost while still handling spikes automatically. How should you configure the reservation?

Accepted Answer

Set a baseline of 500 slots with a 1-year commitment and configure the reservation autoscaler with a max of 1,500 slots so additional capacity is added only when needed.

Answer

Set a baseline of 1,500 slots with no autoscaling to ensure the month-end spikes are always covered.

Answer

Set a baseline of 0 slots and rely entirely on the autoscaler up to 1,500 slots to minimize committed spend.

Answer

Switch the workload to on-demand pricing so BigQuery automatically allocates slots up to the per-project limit without any reservation.