Metabase Big Query Costs

Tips and Tricks
1

Hi I'm currently using Big Query as my data warehouse and I'm looking to get costs down.

I'm currently

  • Partitioning tables where possible
  • Not running select * where possible on queries
  • Have just turned on caching for queries that take over 3 seconds (not sure on how many seconds to go for)

Are there common cost saving measures I'm missing? Should I look to reduce the amount of database scans Metabase does?

Can provide more specific details if it's helpful.

Thanks,

Jeremy

2

Hi @j95
Limit the datasets being available in Metabase. Disable "Include User ID and query hash in queries". Only do daily sync. Disable scans.
https://www.metabase.com/docs/latest/databases/connections/bigquery

3

Thanks so much for the quick reply flamber!

4

If you don't mind me asking @j95 – is your usage actually generating costs?

We've been using Metabase with BigQuery for a few months with our team of 8 and so far our usage has stayed under Google's threshold and I'm trying to anticipate (and budget for) the day we exceed the free tier.

5

Hi @jamesgreenblue. The only reason it was costing us anything was that I had set up our Big Query instance with much higher storage and performance than necessary. I've since downgraded it and the costs are now super low. I think we are charged a few dollars a day at the moment.

In general I think it's fairly easy to keep costs low in a small team/with a small amount of data querying.

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