GCP Professional Data Engineer Practice Question

A data engineering team supports an executive dashboard that issues about 60 interactive SQL queries every hour. Each query consistently consumes roughly one slot for less than 30 seconds, and this workload pattern is stable 24×7. Finance wants to replace the current on-demand model with a flat monthly bill while keeping costs as low as possible. Advanced features such as cross-region analysis and a 99.99 % availability SLA are not required. Which approach best meets the cost-optimization goal?

Purchase a 60-slot BigQuery Standard Edition annual capacity commitment and assign those slots to the dashboard project.
Keep on-demand pricing, enable automatic storage scaling, and submit the dashboard queries with BATCH priority.
Buy 60 flex slots under Enterprise Plus Edition and start them manually during business hours.
Continue using on-demand pricing but set a per-query maximumBytesBilled limit to cap daily spending.

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Answer Description

Because the workload is steady and predictable, purchasing dedicated query processing capacity (slots) through a long-term commitment provides the lowest unit price and turns usage-based spend into a fixed monthly cost. Standard Edition offers the lowest slot price of the BigQuery editions and already meets the technical requirements; Enterprise and Enterprise Plus would raise cost without adding needed value. On-demand pricing with max bytes billed still charges per byte scanned, so spend will continue to fluctuate. Flex slots are charged at a higher hourly rate than annual commitments and would have to run continuously to serve the 24×7 workload, eliminating their intended savings. Storage autoscaling and batch priority do not affect on-demand query charges, so they cannot deliver predictable pricing.

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