Understanding how Looker Studio can impact the cost of BigQuery

At a very high level, the total BigQuery cost is driven by how big your data is and the amount of usage. Both factors work as multipliers. For example, if you have a table that’s 1 TB in size and you access the table 10,000 times in a month, it means the BigQuery cost will be 1TB x 10,000 x $5 = $50,000 / month.

Whether $50,000 is expensive or not depends on your organization. But we will ignore the context and focus on the cost driver aspects, so let’s say $50,000 is expensive. Now, the questions are, what kind of table could be 1 TB in size? and how can a table be accessed 10,000 times in a month? We’ll discuss these questions in the following sections.

What kind of table could be 1 TB in size?

To answer this, let’s take a look at our data warehouse diagram from Chapter 3, Building a Data Warehouse in BigQuery:

Figure 7.24 – High-level data layers...