Optimizing Queries in BigQuery: A Step-by-Step Guide for Beginners
Google BigQuery is a powerful tool for analyzing large datasets. However, to get the best performance and cost-efficiency from BigQuery, it’s essential to optimize your queries.
This guide will take you through the steps to optimize your BigQuery queries, even if you’re just starting out.
Understanding BigQuery Billing.
This section is crucial because understanding how billing works in BigQuery is essential. In a previous project, we learned this the hard way when our bill increased by $500 from one week to the next. I don’t want the same to happen to you, so here are my tips.
Before diving into optimization techniques, it’s important to understand how BigQuery billing works:
- Storage costs: You pay for the amount of data stored.
- Query costs: You pay for the amount of data processed by your queries.
Optimizing your queries can help reduce the amount of data processed, thereby lowering costs and improving performance.
Step 1: Use SELECT * Sparingly
Using SELECT * retrieves all columns from a table, which can be expensive and slow if the table is large. Instead, specify only the columns you…
