Question

Your company recently purchased a 2,000-slot annual flat-rate commitment in BigQuery to handle the analytics workload of several teams. Three months in, the finance team reports the commitment is expensive, and you suspect it is over-provisioned. Before renewing or resizing, you need data-driven evidence about how many slots your queries actually consume during peak and off-peak periods, and how a smaller commitment would affect query performance. What should you do to right-size the commitment?

Accepted Answer

Use the BigQuery slot estimator (autoscaler recommendations) and the INFORMATION_SCHEMA.JOBS slot-consumption views to analyze historical slot usage and model the performance impact of different commitment sizes before adjusting.

Answer

Immediately cancel the annual commitment and switch all workloads to on-demand pricing, since on-demand is always cheaper than flat-rate for underutilized reservations.

Answer

Reduce the commitment to 500 slots right away and wait for user complaints to determine whether the smaller size causes performance problems.

Answer

Enable BI Engine on all datasets so that queries no longer consume reservation slots, eliminating the need to analyze slot usage.