A slot is a narrow opening, hole or gap for receiving something. It can also refer to a time period, position or window of opportunity. Examples of slots are a time slot in the school calendar or a slot on an airplane flight schedule.

A pay table in a slot game is the built-in hub of easily accessible information that provides players with all of the key details about the specific game they’re playing. Despite the fact that online slots have evolved to become much more complex than their classic casino counterparts, players still need the information provided by a pay table to play safely and make smart decisions when placing their bets.

Pay tables in slot games provide valuable information about the symbols and their possible combinations that can result in winning prizes. In addition, they provide valuable tips about how to maximize the player’s chances of winning by displaying the coin amounts or multipliers that can be won depending on the symbols landed on the reels. In recent decades, slots have advanced from simple classics to feature innovative features, special symbols and hundreds of ways to win. Hence, it’s important to read and understand all of this information before making any betting decisions in order to enjoy slots more and avoid any possible problems that can arise from not knowing the rules of a particular game.

BigQuery uses a shared-scheduling model for query execution and processing capacity management. The shared-scheduling model allows jobs to borrow idle slots for faster execution and reduces latency. If a job uses more slots than its fair share of the overall available capacity, it might cause other jobs to delay execution or even run out of available slots altogether. To prevent these delays, BigQuery preemptively borrows additional idle slots from other running queries in the same administration project. This may cause periods of total slot consumption above your specified slot capacity, but you are not charged directly for this excess usage.

Idle slots are committed to a reservation baseline and autoscaling, but not yet used by a query. If you have a reservation that is assigned the ML_EXTERNAL assignment type, its idle slots cannot be used by other reservations. As a best practice, set ignore_idle_slots to false for reservations that are assigned this assignment type. Otherwise, these reservations might not have enough available slots to start working. This can lead to a delay in their starting time and a decrease in overall query throughput. However, this can also help to avoid a situation where there are too few slots available to run all of the desired queries. In this case, you might consider reducing the number of assigned reservations or changing to the capacity-based model.