A slot is a narrow depression, groove, notch, slit, or aperture; especially one for receiving something such as a coin. It may also refer to a position in a sequence or schedule: He’ll be giving his talk at the 5 o’clock slot.
A time or place allocated for a particular activity: The show’s new timeslot will give it a better chance of drawing viewers.
An assignable place in a system: the slot reserved for the program’s chief copy editor.
In computing, a space in memory or on disk etc in which a particular type of object can be stored: I’ve used up all my free slots in my file system.
A reserved position in a queue or schedule: She’s in the 2 p.m. slot for appointments.
A logical position in an organization or hierarchy: She has the slot for coordinating departmental communications.
An assigned portion of a workday or other time: He works the morning shift and has his afternoon slot reserved for studying.
In ornithology, a narrow notch between the tips of the primary feathers on certain birds that allows air to flow smoothly over their wings during flight.
A narrow opening in a wall or door into which a bolt can be fitted.
The term is also used of an area in front of an opponent’s goal in ice hockey, affording a vantage point for attacking players: He was trying to gain ground on his opponents in the face-off slots before they could eject him from the game.
In a game of cards, the space in the center of the table occupied by a king or queen. In aviation, the scheduled time for an aircraft’s departure or arrival at an airport runway.
An assigned part of a data set or other resource: The database contains many different kinds of information, but we’ve given each topic its own dedicated slot so that we can provide the best possible service to our customers.
In BigQuery, a slot is the amount of capacity that is reserved for query processing. By default, queries running in a reservation use idle slots that aren’t committed by another reservation in the same administration project. When the number of executing queries in a reservation exceeds its commitments, BigQuery allocates additional slots to prevent any performance degradation.
BigQuery’s capacity-based pricing model allows you to explicitly control the number of slots that are available for your queries. You can also opt to let BigQuery allocate your slots for you, using fair scheduling. When a query’s demand for slots changes due to a change in the query’s dynamic DAG, BigQuery automatically re-evaluates the allocation of its slot capacity and pauses, resumes, or allocates additional slots as needed. Assignments with type ML_EXTERNAL are an exception and cannot share idle slots. Idle slots in a reservation with this assignment type are not preemptible by jobs of other assignments types, including those in other reservations. This restriction helps ensure that ML_EXTERNAL jobs don’t overcommit resources and disrupt other users’ data processing.
