Question

Your team runs a nightly BigQuery batch load pipeline plus dozens of interactive analyst queries during business hours, all on a single on-demand billing project. Finance reports monthly BigQuery costs are volatile and unpredictable, and they want a predictable maximum monthly spend without blocking analysts entirely when batch jobs are running. You must reorganize the workloads to give both predictable cost and workload isolation. Which approach best meets these requirements?

Accepted Answer

Purchase a BigQuery Editions capacity commitment and create two separate reservations — one assigned to the ETL project and one to the analytics project — each with a baseline and a capped max autoscale slot count.

Answer

Keep on-demand billing but set a project-level custom quota limiting bytes billed per day, and ask analysts to schedule heavy queries at night.

Answer

Move all workloads into a single reservation with a large baseline and unlimited autoscaling so no job is ever queued.

Answer

Switch the nightly batch load to flex slots purchased each evening and leave analyst queries on on-demand pricing.