Introduction to workload management

BigQuery workload management lets you allocate and manage computeresources available for data analysis and processing, and also lets you specify howyou are charged for those resources.

Workload management models

BigQuery offers two models of workload management.Withon-demand billing, you pay for the number of bytes processedwhen you query or process your data. Withcapacity-based billing, youallocate processing capacity for workloads with the option of automaticallyscaling capacity up and down when needed.

You can switch between on-demand and capacity-based billing models at any time.You can also use acombination of the two models.

Choosing a model

Consider the following when choosing a workload management model:

Jobs

Every time youload,export,query, orcopy data, BigQuery automatically creates, schedules, and runs a job that tracks the progress of the task.

Because jobs can potentially take a long time to complete, they run asynchronously and can bepolled for their status. Shorter actions, such as listing resources or getting metadata, are notmanaged as jobs.

For more information about jobs, seeManage jobs.

Slots

A BigQuery slot is avirtual compute unit used by BigQueryto execute SQL queries or otherjob types.During the execution of a query, BigQuery automatically determineshow many slots are used by the query. The number of slots used depends on theamount of data being processed, the complexity of the query, and the number ofslots available.

To learn more about slots and how they are used, seeunderstand slots.

Reservations

In the capacity-based pricing model, slots are allocated in poolscalledreservations. Reservations let you assign slots in ways that make sensefor your organization. For example, you might create a reservation namedprodfor production workloads, and a separate reservation namedtest for testing,so that test jobs don't compete for capacity with production workloads. Or, youmight create reservations for different departments in your organization.

For more information about reservations, seeworkload management using reservations.

BI Engine

BI Engine is a fast, in-memory analysis service that accelerates manySQL queries in BigQuery by intelligently caching the data you use mostfrequently. BI Engine can accelerate SQL queries from any source,including those written by data visualization tools, and can manage cachedtables for ongoing optimization.

BI Engine reservationsare allocated in GiB of memory and managed separately from slot reservations.

For more information about BI Engine, seeIntroduction to BI Engine.

What's next

• Understand slots
• Understand reservations
• Learn abouton-demand pricing
• Learn aboutcapacity-basedpricing
• Estimate and control costs
• Create custom cost controls