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BigQuery Cost & Performance Optimization

Guides an agent to cut BigQuery costs via editions, storage billing, partitioning, lifecycle rules and SQL tuning.

Source Download skill
Repository
google/skills
Stars
21,782
Licence
Apache-2.0
Files
10 files

What it does

Once installed, the agent follows structured workflows for optimizing a Google BigQuery environment. It can help decide whether to move workloads from on-demand pricing to Editions and size reservations, choose physical vs. logical storage billing, design partitioning and clustering with ready-made DDL templates, set table and dataset expiration rules, evaluate search indexes, materialized views and BI Engine, and suggest SQL query improvements. It points users to Google's built-in recommendation tools and gives step-by-step guidance for them.

Great for

  • Data engineers trying to reduce a BigQuery bill
  • Platform teams rightsizing BigQuery reservations or planning an Editions migration
  • Analysts who want their large tables and slow dashboards made cheaper and faster to query

Skip it if

  • Diagnosing why one specific job failed or ran slowly, which the skill explicitly sends to bigquery-troubleshooting (risk: wrong tool for the job)
  • Changing production schemas, billing models or expirations without review, since the skill generates DDL that modifies tables and can drop data via expiration settings
  • Non-BigQuery warehouses, because all guidance is specific to Google Cloud BigQuery

Try asking

  • “Should our project move from on-demand to BigQuery Editions? Help me size the reservation.”
  • “Find unpartitioned tables in my dataset and write a CTAS migration to partition them by date.”
  • “Compare physical and logical storage billing for my datasets and recommend one.”
  • “Rewrite this slow SQL query to scan less data and reduce slot time.”
Step-by-step guide: how to use BigQuery Cost & Performance OptimizationInstall, first run, examples, tips and FAQs

Install in 3 steps

  1. 1

    Download the skill

    The ZIP contains the 10 original files, the Apache-2.0 licence and an attribution note.

    bigquery-optimization.zip
  2. 2

    Add it to your agent

    Claude Code (all projects)

    mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills && unzip bigquery-optimization.zip -d ~/.claude/skills/

    Claude Code / Agent SDK (this project only)

    mkdir -p .claude/skills && unzip bigquery-optimization.zip -d .claude/skills/

    Claude apps (web/desktop): Settings → Capabilities → Skills → Upload skill, and choose the ZIP.

  3. 3

    Ask for the task

    No special command needed — the agent reads the skill's description and loads it when your request matches. Try one of the prompts above.

Get better results

  • Review every generated DDL statement and run evaluation queries in a test project before applying changes to production.
  • Give the agent your project ID and region up front, since storage queries must be scoped to the correct regional dataset and 0 rows can mean a region mismatch.
  • Use the least-privileged IAM role that fits the task, and avoid placing service account keys in shared environments.

What's inside

  • references/attribution.md
  • references/bi_engine.md
  • references/capacity_planning_editions.md
  • references/materialized_views.md
  • references/search_indexes.md
  • references/sql_optimization.md
  • references/storage_billing_models.md
  • references/storage_lifecycle_management.md
  • references/table_partitioning_clustering.md
  • SKILL.md

Redistributed unmodified from google/skills under the Apache-2.0 licence. The assessment was drafted with AI from the skill's files on 2026-10-29. Skills can instruct your agent to run code — read SKILL.md and any scripts before installing.