PDE Maintaining and Automating Data Workloads Practice Question
You manage a BigQuery reservation with 500 baseline slots and autoscaling up to 2000 slots. Your team runs a mix of interactive queries and batch load jobs. During peak hours, you notice that interactive queries are throttled when autoscaling slots are consumed by long-running batch loads. How can you ensure interactive queries get priority access to slots?
⚠ Common exam trap
Google often tests the misconception that autoscaling alone or reducing baseline slots can solve priority issues, but the key is that without separate reservations and explicit priority assignments, all jobs compete equally for the same pool of slots.
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
✓
Create a separate reservation for interactive queries with a higher priority assignment.
BigQuery reservations allow you to create separate reservations for different workloads (e.g., interactive queries vs. batch loads) and assign them different priority levels. By creating a dedicated reservation for interactive queries with a higher priority, you ensure that interactive queries get preferential access to slots, even when autoscaling slots are consumed by long-running batch jobs. This directly addresses the contention issue without reducing overall capacity.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Create a separate reservation for interactive queries with a higher priority assignment.
Why this is correct
Creating separate reservations for interactive and batch workloads allows you to control slot allocation and prioritize interactive queries.
- ✗
Reduce the baseline slots to 200 and rely solely on autoscaling.
Why it's wrong here
Reducing baseline slots could degrade interactive performance when autoscaling is delayed.
- ✗
Switch to on-demand pricing to eliminate slot contention.
Why it's wrong here
On-demand pricing removes slot management but may increase costs and still have concurrent quota limits.
- ✗
Set the autoscaling max to 1000 slots for batch jobs.
Why it's wrong here
BigQuery does not allow per-job-type autoscaling limits within a single reservation.
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