What to know when working with Google’s Data Warehouse

Best Practices when working with Google’s BigQuery

How to optimize Usage and Costs

Christianlauer
6 min readAug 24, 2021

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Photo by Drastic Graphics on Unsplash

BigQuery is a SaaS (Software as a Service) Data Warehouse technology and will charge you in a pay for what you use pricing model. In this short article, I want to show you what the prices are and how you can optimize your use.

Which Actions do actually cost money?

The good thing first — a few actions within BigQuery are for free, like:

  • Load Data (From a Bucket e.g)
  • Extract Data (To a Google Sheet e.g)
  • Copy Data (To a new table e.g)
  • Delete Tables, Views and Datasets
  • Cluster and Partition Tables

But you can probably guess that the most common activities such as storage and querying do cost some money. Especially the last function is the one that Google uses for earning money. For more details visit Googles BigQuery pricing [1].

How much do the Actions cost?

The common overview will give you a first insight of what the costs of the most common tasks in BigQuery look like:

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Christianlauer
Christianlauer

Written by Christianlauer

Big Data Enthusiast based in Hamburg and Kiel. Thankful if you would support my writing via: https://christianlauer90.medium.com/membership