Question

A retail company uses BigQuery with a flat-rate reservation of 1,000 slots. Their nightly ETL jobs and interactive BI dashboard queries share the same reservation. During the day, analysts complain that dashboards are slow whenever ad-hoc data science queries run large scans, and at night the ETL jobs sometimes run long because reporting refresh jobs compete for slots. The team wants to isolate these workloads so critical dashboards always get priority, while still allowing idle capacity to be reused. What should they do?

Accepted Answer

Create separate reservations (e.g., for BI, ETL, and data science) with assigned baseline slots, attach projects/folders via assignments, and leave 'ignore idle slots' disabled so unused slots are shared across reservations.

Answer

Switch all workloads to on-demand pricing so each query is isolated by Google's per-query capacity and no workload can starve another.

Answer

Keep a single reservation but increase the total commitment to 3,000 slots so there is always enough capacity for every workload simultaneously.

Answer

Create one reservation per workload and enable 'ignore idle slots' on all of them so each workload is strictly capped and never borrows capacity.