That is a sad story. And I think the referenced doc fragment is even worse than they described; they wrote: > BigQuery charges based on referenced data, not pr

That is a sad story. And I think the referenced doc fragment is even worse than they described; they wrote: > BigQuery charges based on referenced data, not processed data! (emphasis theirs) and linked to a doc that says: > When you run a query, you're charged according to the data processed in the columns you select, even if you set an explicit `LIMIT` on the results. I would have interpreted the latter to mean something else, like that you get charged for scanning all rows when you do something like the following: select a, sum(b) as b_sum from table group by a order by b_sum limit 10; ...because my post-group LIMIT clause doesn't actually prevent it from needing all rows. But their query should genuinely not need all rows. It does need all partitions. I suppose if they have way too many partitions (such that each is <= the minimum fetch size, note: see edit below) then GCP genuinely needs to fetch all the data. Otherwise I am surprised they were charged so much. edit: a caveat on "such that each is <= the minimum fetch size", I suppose their "select *" together with the columnar format might mean that I should word this as something like each (partition, column) is <= the minimum fetch size.