9 documented GCP BigQuery cost inefficiencies, each with how to detect it and how to fix it.
GCP BigQueryCER-0295
Analysts use SELECT * (reading more columns than needed) and/or rely on LIMIT as a cost-control mechanism. In BigQuery, projecting excess columns increases the amount of data read and can materially raise query cost, particularly on wide...
GCP BigQueryCER-0226
Highly compressible datasets, such as those with repeated string fields, nested structures, or uniform rows, can benefit significantly from physical storage billing. Yet most datasets remain on logical storage by default, even when...
GCP BigQueryCER-0069
Teams often adopt capacity-based pricing (BigQuery editions reservations with baseline slots and optional commitments) to stabilize costs or optimize for heavy, recurring workloads. However, if query volumes drop - due to seasonal cycles,...
GCP BigQueryCER-0024
BigQuery incentivizes efficient data retention by cutting storage costs in half for tables or partitions that go 90 days without modification. However, many teams unintentionally forfeit this discount by performing broad or unnecessary...
GCP BigQueryCER-0484
BigQuery charges for queries by the data they process (on-demand pricing) or by the slot capacity they consume (capacity pricing). When a large table is neither partitioned nor clustered, a query that filters on a date or key column still...
GCP BigQueryCER-0485
BigQuery bills queries by default on the on-demand model, per TiB of data processed. The alternative is capacity pricing through BigQuery editions, where compute is billed per slot-hour with autoscaling and optional baseline and committed...
GCP BigQueryCER-0486
On the on-demand pricing model, every BigQuery query is billed for the data it processes, and there is no per-query or per-user spending limit unless one is configured. The default project-level quota allows 200 TiB of data processed per...
GCP BigQueryCER-0487
BigQuery tables never expire unless an expiration is set. Google's documentation is explicit: if no default table expiration is set on the dataset and no expiration is set on the table when it is created, the table never expires and must...
GCP BigQueryCER-0488
BigQuery offers two streaming paths. The Storage Write API (REST), previously known as the legacy tabledata.insertAll method, bills streamed data per 200 MiB and counts every row as at least 1 KB. The Storage Write API over gRPC bills per...
