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A fast growing analytics agency depends on Google BigQuery to support client reporting, internal dashboards, and ongoing analysis.
As the agency scaled and onboarded more clients, data volumes increased rapidly. While BigQuery handled the growth from a performance standpoint, monthly warehouse costs climbed just as quickly. What started as manageable spend became a growing concern for forecasting and profitability.
The agency partnered with Calibrate Analytics to audit their data warehouse configuration, identify the root causes of rising costs, and implement a more efficient, scalable BigQuery setup.
The Challenge: Controlling BigQuery Costs at Scale
Like many analytics teams, the agency's BigQuery environment grew organically over time. Dashboards, queries, and datasets were added as needed, without a consistent cost optimization strategy in place.
Key challenges included:
- Dashboards queried raw data directly, driving up refresh costs
- Lack of partitioning and clustering caused queries to scan more data than necessary
- No cost monitoring or alerts were in place, making spend spikes hard to detect early
- Historical and unused data remained in active storage
These issues led to higher than expected query volumes, unpredictable monthly costs, and limited visibility into where spend was coming from.
The Process: Optimizing BigQuery for Cost and Performance
Calibrate Analytics conducted a full audit of the agency’s BigQuery environment, focusing on how data was stored, queried, and accessed by dashboards and analysts.
The solution centered on reducing the amount of data scanned per query and improving cost visibility. Dashboards were refactored to pull from optimized tables and views instead of raw data. Core datasets were partitioned and clustered to limit query scope. Historical and unused data was archived to lower ongoing storage costs. Cost monitoring and alerts were implemented to surface spend anomalies early and prevent surprises.
Development and testing workflows were also adjusted to use smaller sample datasets rather than full production tables.
The Results: Over $100K in Annual BigQuery Savings
The agency saw immediate and measurable improvements:
- Over $100K in BigQuery cost savings
- Significantly lower query volumes from dashboards
- Faster dashboard load times for internal teams and clients
- More predictable monthly data warehouse costs
With a more efficient BigQuery setup in place, the agency can continue to scale client reporting without runaway warehouse spend.
Ready to Optimize Your BigQuery Environment?
Calibrate Analytics helps teams reduce data warehouse costs, improve query performance, and build scalable analytics infrastructure.
If your BigQuery usage is growing faster than your budget, we can help you regain control and plan for sustainable growth.
