Google BigQuery is a fully managed, serverless data warehouse built for large-scale analytics. For data engineers, it offers a rich set of features spanning pricing models, storage optimization, ingestion pipelines, security controls, transformation frameworks, and operational tooling. This cheat sheet covers every major capability you need to design, build, and operate production BigQuery workloads.
What This Cheat Sheet Covers
This topic spans 16 focused tables and 101 indexed concepts. Below is a complete table-by-table outline of this topic, spanning foundational concepts through advanced details.
A jump-to index of every table row in this cheat sheet.
An interactive map of every table and concept in this topic.
Table 1: Pricing Models — On-Demand vs Capacity-Based
BigQuery offers two fundamentally different billing approaches. On-demand charges per byte scanned and suits sporadic workloads, while capacity-based pricing purchases dedicated slots and suits high-throughput, predictable workloads. Choosing the right model has a large impact on total cost.
| Model | Example | Description | |
|---|---|---|---|
-- $6.25 per TiB scanned-- 2,000 concurrent slots per projectSELECT * FROM large_table | • Charges $6.25 per TiB of bytes processed • no upfront commitment • default model for new projects | ||
-- Standard: $0.04/slot-hr-- Enterprise: $0.06/slot-hr-- Enterprise Plus: $0.10/slot-hr | • Slot-hour billing replaces per-byte charges • choose Standard, Enterprise, or Enterprise Plus based on feature needs and SLO requirements | ||
-- Max 1,600 baseline slots-- Autoscale only (no baseline)-- $0.04/slot-hr | • Entry-level capacity edition • supports autoscaling but not baseline slot reservations • no cross-region disaster recovery | ||
-- Baseline + autoscale slots-- BigQuery Omni supported-- $0.06/slot-hr | Adds baseline slot reservations, multi-region replication, BigQuery Omni, and 99.9% SLO over Standard. | ||
-- Managed DR + Assured Workloads-- 99.99% SLO-- $0.10/slot-hr | • Highest tier • adds managed disaster recovery, Assured Workloads (compliance), and cross-region failover | ||
-- 1-year commitment: 20% discount-- 3-year commitment: 40% discountgcloud bigquery reservations commitments create | • Purchase committed slots for 1 or 3 years to reduce slot-hour cost • unused committed slots can be shared via idle slot sharing | ||
bq query --dry_run \ "SELECT * FROM dataset.table" | Estimates bytes processed before execution; no slot usage, no charge; essential for on-demand cost control. | | |||
-- 10 GiB storage free/month-- 1 TiB queries free/month | Monthly free allowance for storage and on-demand queries; resets each calendar month; does not apply to capacity editions. |