A slot is a narrow opening in which something, such as a coin or letter, may be inserted. It may also refer to a position, time, or opportunity. For example, you might hear someone say, “I’m going to be late for my next appointment because I’ll have to leave early to make the first train.” Or, you might read in a book that a player missed out on a spot in the team’s lineup.
In a video game, a slot is an area in which you can place your bets. These are usually marked on the screen by a’stake’ or ‘bet’ button. Some slots also have a ‘pay table’ display, which shows all of the possible combinations of symbols and bets and their payouts. This can help you make better decisions about how much to wager.
In BigQuery, a slot is a commitment to use a specific portion of the overall query processing resources. BigQuery dynamically allocates these slots based on the needs of all queries running in the same administration project. Depending on your workload, access to more slots can improve query performance. However, be careful when assigning a large number of slots to one reservation because this can result in a temporary increase in your cost per query until the allocated slots are preempted by other assignments. You can check the current status of your slots by reviewing the BigQuery Monitoring page. If you are on the on-demand pricing model, you can purchase more slots to speed up your queries.
