[falling_myshkin]

i don't disagree with the premise that Google should be responsible and explicitly acknowledge that the average computer-interested person trying out bigquery has no clue how sharp of a knife it is and they actually do need to be protected from themselves. I was in this boat only a few months ago. One thing I will say though is that I think the documentation is actually quite comprehensive, and personally after taking the time to RTFM and actually understand things like columnar storage, partitioned and clustered tables, etc., I was able to optimize costs quite a bit for our use case and am quite pleased with the product overall. Just takes time to learn, it's a (necessarily imo) intricate machine.