New BigQuery editions: flexibility and predictability for your data cloud

When it comes to their data platforms, organizations want flexibility, predictable pricing, and the best price performance. Today at the Data Cloud & AI Summit, we are announcing BigQuery editions with three pricing tiers — Standard, Enterprise and Enterprise Plus — for you to choose from, with the ability to mix and match for the right price-performance based on your individual workload needs. 

BigQuery editions come with two innovations. First, we are announcing compute capacity autoscaling that adds fine-grained compute resources in real-time to match the needs of your workload demands, and ensure you only pay for the compute capacity you use. Second, compressed storage pricing allows you to only pay for data storage after it’s been highly compressed. With compressed storage pricing, you can reduce your storage costs while increasing your data footprint at the same time. These updates reflect our commitment to offer new, flexible pricing models for our cloud portfolio.

With over a decade of continuous innovation and working together with customers, we’ve made BigQuery one of the most unified, open, secure and intelligent data analytics platforms on the market, and a central component of your data cloud. Unique capabilities include BigQuery ML for using machine learning through SQL, BigQuery Omni for cross-cloud analytics, BigLake for unifying data warehouses and lakes, support for analyzing all types of data, an integrated experience for Apache Spark, geospatial analysis, and much more. All these capabilities build on the recent innovations we announced at Google Cloud Next in 2022.

“Google Cloud has taken a significant step to mature the way customers can consume data analytics. Fine-grained autoscaling ensures customers pay only for what they use, and the new BigQuery editions is designed to provide more pricing choice for their workloads.” — Sanjeev Mohan, Principal at SanjMo & former Gartner Research VP. 

With our new flexible pricing options, the ability to mix and match editions, and multi-year usage discounts, BigQuery customers can gain improved predictability and lower total cost of ownership. In addition, with BigQuery’s new granular autoscaling, we estimate customers can reduce their current committed capacity by 30-40%. 

"BigQuery’s flexible support for pricing allows PayPal to consolidate data as a lakehouse. Compressed storage along with autoscale options in BigQuery helps us provide scalable data processing pipelines and data usage in a cost-effective manner to our user community." — Bala Natarajan, VP Enterprise Data Platforms at PayPal. 

More flexibility to optimize data workloads for price-performance

BigQuery editions allow you to pick the right feature set for individual workload requirements. For example, the Standard Edition is best for ad-hoc, development, and test workloads, while Enterprise has increased security, governance, machine learning and data management features. Enterprise Plus is targeted at mission-critical workloads that demand high uptime, availability and recovery requirements, or have complex regulatory needs. The table below describes each packaging option.

Pay only for what you use

BigQuery autoscaler manages compute capacity for you. You can set up maximum and optional baseline compute capacity, and let BigQuery take care of provisioning and optimizing compute capacity based on usage without any manual intervention on your part. This ensures you get sufficient capacity while reducing management overhead and underutilized capacity. 

Unlike alternative VM-based solutions that charge for a full warehouse with pre-provisioned, fixed capacity, BigQuery harnesses the power of a serverless architecture to provision additional capacity in increments of slots with per-second billing, so you only pay for what you use. 

“BigQuery’s new pricing flexibility allows us to use editions to support the needs of our business at the most granular level.” — Antoine Castex, Group Data Architect at L’Oréal.

Here are a few examples of customers benefiting from autoscaling: 

• Retailers experiencing spikes in demand, scaling for a few hours a couple of times per year
• Analysts compiling quarterly financial reports for the CFO
• Startups managing unpredictable needs in the early stages of their business
• Digital natives preparing for variable demand during new product launches
• Healthcare organizations scaling usage during seasonal outbreaks like the flu

Lower your data storage costs

As data volumes grow exponentially, customers find it increasingly complex and expensive to store and manage data at scale. With the compressed storage billing model you can manage complexity across all data types while keeping costs low.

Compressed storage in BigQuery is grounded in our years of innovation in storage optimization, columnar compression, and compaction. With this feature, leader in security operations Exabeam has achieved a compression rate of more than 12:1 and can store more data at a lower cost which helps their customers solve the most complex security challenges. As customers migrate to BigQuery editions or continue to leverage the on-demand model, they can take advantage of the compressed storage billing model to store more data cost-efficiently.

Next steps for BigQuery customers 

Starting on July 5, 2023, BigQuery customers will no longer be able to purchase flat-rate annual, flat-rate monthly, and flex slot commitments. Customers already leveraging existing flat-rate pricing can begin migrating their flat and flex capacity to the right edition based on their business requirements, with options to move to edition tiers as their needs change. 

Taking into account BigQuery’s serverless functionality, query performance, and capability improvements, we are increasing the price of the on-demand analysis model by 25% across all regions, starting on July 5, 2023. 

Irrespective of which pricing model you choose, the combination of these innovations with multi-year commitment usage discounts, can help you lower your total cost of ownership. Refer to the latest BigQuery cost optimization guide to learn more.

Customers will receive more information about the changes coming to BigQuery’s commercial model through a Mandatory Service Announcement email in the next few days. In the meantime, check out the FAQs, pricing information and product documentation, and register for the upcoming BigQuery roadmap session on April 5, 2023 to learn more about BigQuery’s latest innovations.