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Accepted answer
BigQuery Reservations with flex slots, hourly rather than an annual commitment, are built for exactly this. Buy a burst of slots for the close window and release them after instead of paying for flat-rate capacity year-round.
On-demand BigQuery pricing works fine most of the month, but month-end close runs dozens of heavy finance queries concurrently and everything slows to a crawl. Considering flat-rate slots just for that week.
Accepted answer
BigQuery Reservations with flex slots, hourly rather than an annual commitment, are built for exactly this. Buy a burst of slots for the close window and release them after instead of paying for flat-rate capacity year-round.
Small nit: the broadcast hint gets ignored once the table is over threshold, check the UI to confirm.
Also worth triaging the finance queries themselves. If several are scanning full tables that could use a date filter or a materialized aggregate, slot contention might partly be self-inflicted.
Flex slots for the close week, plus we found two queries missing partition filters. Both helped.
Careful with NULL in join keys, they'll drop rows in an inner join.
In our case the root cause was an implicit cast preventing pushdown.
Document the grain decision, most BI bugs turn out to be grain bugs.
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