Is it more cost-effective to use views in BigQuery instead of simple SQL?

Question

You pay per size of data queried. So, would be a better alternative to use views from the cost point of view?

Answer 1

Views are not materialized in bigquery (currently), so the cost of querying from a view is identical to writing the more complex query on the underlying table.

You can, of course, create your own "materialized views" by running a query and saving it as a table. Then you can run subsequent queries against that table. This may be more cost effective if the saved table is smaller than the underlying table. That takes a bit more manual bookkeeping, however.