In BigQuery there is a free tier for querying data. As long as less than 1 tebibyte of data is queried in a month there are no charges associated with querying data. This post shows how to set up a quota in BigQuery to not exceed this free threshold.
Video walk through:
Follow along:
In Google Cloud Platform navigate to the all quotas page
On the all quotas page, filter the results for “bigquery” and “quota”
Find the service with name “Query usage per day”. for this line in the table click the 3 dots at the right hand side of that row and click edit quota.
If this is your first time editing the quota the unlimited checkbox will need to be unchecked before a value can be inserted.
Input 0.03 in the value box and leave the units as TiB (tebibyte). This is equivalent to around 30 gigabytes each day.
Why 0.03 tebibytes?
1 terabyte is free each month
Assuming 30 days each month gives 0.03 (or 1 / 30) terabytes that can be queried each day
Then click the “Submit Request” button to apply this quota.
A message will pop up confirming the quota has been set, and you’re all done!
With this quota set you can run queries in BigQuery without worrying about incurring any charges. Using table sampling can also help make sure the all the bytes in the quota are not used up by simply trying to look at the data.
Inspired by this email from Google, who are changing some of their cost management processes for BigQuery in particular.
