Previously, if you had a BigQuery external table on top of GCS files, and those files had Nearline / Coldline / Archive storage classes (e.g. due to a bucket lifecycle policy), you were not billed for retrieval fees when reading those files through the BQ external table.
This was a billing bug that was already mentioned in 2020 on StackOverflow.
But the bug has been fixed on February 21, 2025. So we are now billed for that. We started seeing 10.000 $ of retrieval fees due to that. I did a deep dive and found this.
The fact that some of our DBT projects were re-creating the external tables daily was not helping...
