Controlling and monitoring use of BI Engine Reservations

Question

With the new beta BI Engine Reservations, I've noticed some queries speed up, but others remain unaffected. Will it be possible - to monitor how the reservation is being used? - to have some control over how the reservation is used?

Answer 1

When it comes to control, I've seen no indication that you'll have any—the system decides what the most efficient mechanism is (BI Engine, query cache, etc.) and then allocates accordingly. Also, the size of your reservation, usage, and age are factored into what is added and subsequently removed from the BI Engine reservation.

While that may seem frustrating, it's also the selling point: zero-config, automatic acceleration of your dashboards. As Google iterates quickly on these products, I would expect some controls to find their way in eventually.

As a workaround, you could use a separate project for data you want to ensure has access to the full reservation (since BI Engine is project-level).

As was mentioned elsewhere, there are a handful of metrics that can be viewed using Stackdriver logging (if you enable it). These are all high-level metrics, and are listed in the documentation:

• Reservation Total Bytes
• Reservation Used Bytes
• Inflight Requests
• Request Count
• Request Execution Times

These won't likely give you a lot of the information you're looking for, but can be monitored for patterns.