Question

Your company purchased a one-year BigQuery Enterprise edition slot commitment 11 months ago to cover predictable ELT workloads. A recent architecture change moved most transformations to Dataflow, and internal reports show the committed slots are now consistently underutilized. Finance asks you to reduce ongoing BigQuery compute spend as the commitment nears expiration, while keeping some guaranteed capacity for remaining BI queries. What should you do?

Accepted Answer

Before the commitment renews, disable auto-renewal and create a new smaller baseline reservation sized to the reduced BI workload, allowing autoscaling for occasional spikes.

Answer

Let the current commitment auto-renew, then delete unused reservations the following month once usage stabilizes.

Answer

Immediately cancel the active commitment and switch all workloads to on-demand pricing to avoid any further capacity charges.

Answer

Move all remaining BI queries to a separate on-demand project and keep the full commitment reservation idle as a backup.