BigQuery FinOps Query Pack

A maintained library of INFORMATION_SCHEMA and billing-export queries — one page per question, each with what it returns, how to read it, and what it costs to run. Most of them are free to run because metadata queries scan no bytes.

24 recipes · 19 of them scan no billable bytes.

Region-scoped or dataset-scoped? JOBS, JOBS_TIMELINE and TABLE_STORAGE are qualified by region (`region-us`). COLUMNS, TABLES and TABLE_OPTIONS are qualified by dataset. Mixing the two up is the most common reason a copied INFORMATION_SCHEMA query fails — every recipe here has a picker that fills in the right one.

Query cost & performance

Slots & reservations

Storage

Billing export

Why metadata queries are free

INFORMATION_SCHEMA views are served from BigQuery’s metadata layer, not from your table data, so they scan no billable bytes. That is why most of this pack costs nothing to run and why there is no reason not to run it today. The billing-export recipes are the exception — they query a real table, so filter on the partition column before you run one.

These are the questions. Finitizer keeps the answers current.

Running twenty-four queries by hand once is a good afternoon. Finitizer runs the equivalent continuously across BigQuery, GCP, and AWS, tracks how each number moves between runs, and turns the findings into assigned tasks or a Terraform PR.