Case study / 06
Reducing monthly BigQuery cost by 25%
Combining query analysis, table design, slot tuning, retention, and tiered storage to reduce recurring analytics cost.
- Area
- Analytics cost optimization
- Role
- Senior Data Engineer
- lower monthly BigQuery cost
- 25%
Optimization system
Cost optimization system
Usage evidence drives coordinated changes to queries, table layout, capacity, retention, and storage placement.
ObserveBigQuery usageQueries · slots · storage
- Query behavior
- Table layout
- Capacity
- Retention
- Storage tiering
25%lower recurring monthly cost
Method
- Identified expensive queries and optimized how they accessed data.
- Partitioned and clustered tables to reduce unnecessary scanning.
- Tuned slot capacity and controlled storage growth.
- Removed obsolete data and moved suitable data from BigQuery to Cloud Storage.
Outcome
After the process was implemented, recurring monthly BigQuery cost was reduced by 25 percent.
Team credit
I implemented the optimization work in collaboration with the data engineering team.
System materials
Stack
- BigQuery
- Cloud Storage
- Apache Airflow
- Python
- SQL
- Terraform