Google ACE Planning and Configuring a Cloud Solution Practice Question
A team is using BigQuery for analytics. They have a constant query workload and want to reduce costs by switching from on-demand pricing to a flat-rate reservation. They have purchased a BigQuery flat-rate reservation. What additional step is required to use the reservation?
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Assign the reservation to the desired projects using an assignment
The reservation must be assigned to a project, folder, or organization via a reservation assignment. Without assignment, the reservation is not used, and queries continue to be billed on-demand.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Enable flat-rate billing in the BigQuery settings
Why it's wrong here
Flat-rate billing is not a toggle in BigQuery settings. Instead, flat-rate pricing is implemented through capacity commitments, which are purchased as reservations of BigQuery slots. You must create a capacity commitment, then create a reservation, and then assign it to projects; there is no global billing setting that enables flat-rate pricing.
- ✓
Assign the reservation to the desired projects using an assignment
Why this is correct
After purchasing a capacity commitment, you must create a reservation and then create an assignment that associates that reservation with specific projects (or folders/organizations). Once the assignment is in place, query jobs issued from those assigned projects consume the reserved slots, and their usage is billed at the flat-rate, on-demand pricing no longer applies.
- ✗
No additional steps; flat-rate is automatically applied to all queries
Why it's wrong here
Flat-rate pricing requires active configuration: a capacity commitment, a reservation, and at least one assignment mapping the reservation to projects. Merely purchasing a commitment does not route any queries to it. Without an assignment, all queries continue to run under on-demand pricing, so additional steps are always necessary.
- ✗
Create a new dataset and move all tables into it
Why it's wrong here
Datasets are logical containers for tables, but billing and slot usage are determined by the project that runs the query job, not by dataset placement. Moving tables into a new dataset has no effect on whether a reservation is assigned to the project. Reservations are assigned at the project, folder, or organization level; dataset assignment is not supported.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
BigQuery and Pub/Sub
Key term
Organization
An Organization is a top-level container in Google Cloud that represents your company or entities and serves as the root node for all your cloud resources, policies, and access control.
Key term
Folder
A folder is a logical container used to organize and group digital files, resources, or cloud-based assets within a system or platform.
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