Domain 5 of 5 · Chapter 3 of 5

Organizing Workloads

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Included in this chapter:

  • Two ways to buy BigQuery compute
  • Sizing a reservation: baseline, autoscaling, and idle slots
  • Editions, commitments, and routing jobs with assignments
  • Interactive vs batch priority, and exam traps

BigQuery editions for capacity-based workloads

CapabilityStandardEnterpriseEnterprise Plus
Compute modelAutoscaling onlyAutoscaling + baselineAutoscaling + baseline
Slot commitments (1yr / 3yr)Not supported20% / 40% discount20% / 40% discount
Idle-slot sharingNoYesYes
Set max concurrency targetNoYesYes
Managed disaster recoveryNoNoYes
Best fitLight or experimental useSteady production analyticsRegulated or DR-critical analytics

Decision tree

One query scanstoo much data?Partition / cluster / nest(data-warehouse subtopic)YesJob is deferrable,no one waiting?NoSubmit as BATCH priorityYesTeams starvingeach other's slots?NoSeparate reservations +project / folder assignmentsYesSurprise on-demandbill on a project?NoAdd the missingQUERY assignmentYesSteady heavy volume?Enterprise reservation, baseline+ 1yr or 3yr commitmentNo

Cheat sheet

  • A slot is BigQuery's unit of compute, bought either on-demand or by capacity
  • Capacity-based billing comes in three editions chosen per reservation
  • Set the baseline to your steady floor, autoscaling to cover the spikes
  • Autoscaling adds slots in multiples of 50
  • Idle-slot sharing is ON by default; turn it off with ignore_idle_slots
  • Only baseline and committed slots are shareable, never autoscaled ones
  • Commit steady slots for a 20% (1-year) or 40% (3-year) discount
  • Assignments route a project, folder, or org to a reservation by job type
  • The most-specific assignment wins down the resource hierarchy
  • A project with no QUERY assignment silently falls back to on-demand
  • INTERACTIVE is the default and counts toward the concurrency limit
  • Run deferrable work as BATCH so it queues instead of competing
  • An unstarted batch job times out at 24 hours, it is not promoted
  • Queues cap at 1,000 interactive and 20,000 batch jobs per project per region
  • Isolate competing workloads with separate reservations and assignments
  • Buying more slots does not fix a single query that scans too much
  • Isolate BigQuery tenants by dataset-per-tenant, not project-per-tenant, to scale to thousands
  • Spread BigQuery concurrency across compute-tier projects sharing one reservation

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References

  1. Introduction to BigQuery slots
  2. Introduction to reservations
  3. Use BigQuery autoscaling
  4. Reservation workload management and idle slots
  5. Introduction to BigQuery editions
  6. Work with reservation assignments
  7. Run a query (interactive and batch queries)
  8. Use query queues