Question

Your company purchased 2,000 baseline slots using a BigQuery Enterprise edition capacity commitment. You created two reservations: 'prod-etl' (1,200 slots) for scheduled nightly pipelines and 'adhoc-analytics' (800 slots) for interactive analyst queries during business hours. Overnight, the ETL workload frequently needs more than 1,200 slots while the analytics reservation sits idle, causing pipeline SLAs to be missed. You want to let ETL borrow the unused analytics capacity automatically without buying more slots. What should you do?

Accepted Answer

Enable idle slot sharing on the 'adhoc-analytics' reservation so its unused slots can be consumed by other reservations that need them.

Answer

Increase the baseline slots of the 'prod-etl' reservation to 2,000 and delete the 'adhoc-analytics' reservation.

Answer

Switch the ETL jobs to on-demand pricing so they scale independently of the reservation.

Answer

Set the max autoscaling slots on 'prod-etl' higher, which forces the analytics reservation to release its baseline slots.