Recent submissions

Comment · 2 years ago
Update: Google has been helping me out now, thankfully. Hopefully we can make sure this doesn't happen to others.
Comment · 2 years ago
Yeah, 'LIKE' ops usually give you a full table scan, which is brutal. If it was my own data I'd chop the fields up and index them properly - which is the issue here, it's not your data, so you don't get a say in the indexes, but you do have to pay per row scanned even if you can't apply an index of your own.
Comment · 2 years ago
The FTC is already investigating: https://www.ftc.gov/policy/advocacy-research/tech-at-ftc/202...

I think we (the developer community) need to start pushing back against this abuse, it's getting out of control.

The thing that bothers me the most is I caught this $14k charge b/c I'm a small fry and that money matters to me. How many big accounts just wouldn't notice that? I can't help but think a very non-trivial % of all cloud revenue is just obscure fees that nobody notices - engineers doing the engineering, accounts receivable pays the bills, and the cloud providers get fat.

Comment · 2 years ago
SELECT page, url, payload FROM `{table}` WHERE page like '%{site_domain}/%' AND url like '%[EXAMPLE.COM]%'
Comment · 2 years ago
Here you go!

SELECT page, url, payload FROM `{table}` WHERE page like '%{site_domain}/%' AND url like '%[EXAMPLE.COM]%'

---

There's no LIMIT on it b/c I actually need all the results.

Comment · 2 years ago
Exactly, even after seeing the issue I can't make heads or tails of what the hell a "TBs scanned" is relative to row counts, etc. Likewise, it seems to place a lot of assumptions on knowing what tables include - and on a dataset you didn't build yourself how can you know the tables are optimized to lower your costs? Hell, how can you even know what the costs are?
Comment · 2 years ago
Yeah, I have spent much more than $14k to date and would have spent much more over time, losing my business isn't rational. I think it's just another "Google can't do customer support to literally save their life" example.
Comment · 2 years ago
I've forgotten more Sql than most people ever learn. Time is also valuable and I make trade-offs. Should I spend hours (eg. $$$) to optimize or run a non-optimized query in the background for a different cost? Well, I didn't think the time/benefit/cost equation favored tuning, if I had known that I'd have spent time on tuning. If you offer something for "free" and then change the cost, and don't have any alerting mechanisms to inefficient queries, it's impossible to evaluate trade offs.
Comment · 2 years ago
I was doing historical evaluation for a few sites, so I was running a query for each month going back to 2016 for each site. I've done this before with no real issues, and if I knew the charges were rapidly exploding I'd have halted the script immediately - but instead it ran for 2 hours and the first notice I got was the CC charge.
Comment · 2 years ago
Yes, sure there's stuff I could have done better, and stayed up all night looking at the fine print. But that's not the point - this is *warning* to other people who see the Internet Archive logo, the words "public", and for some dumb reason also trust Google. I'm hoping this doesn't happen to others, I learned a costly lesson.
Comment · 2 years ago
It wasn't personal use, for business - but I'm bootstrapping a startup, so it's a very tough lesson to learn.
Comment · 2 years ago
Yup, I'm already having to pay legal fees - which is why you have a biz lawyer on retainer to start with - but I'm not sure I have any standing.
Comment · 2 years ago
Yeah, I'm basically just having to write this off so it sucks for me (a lot - I'm bootstrapping a start up), but I'm more worried about other people (especially students) getting caught up in what feels like a scam given the language on the website not, ya know, mentioning the risk of being charged $14k.
Comment · 2 years ago
Yes and no, I ran the script before and the fee wasn't that high (they jacked it up last summer). Usually I have to jump through a ton of hoops just to add more CPU cores to my VMs so I "trusted" that GCP would warn me if I ever made an error.

One of the bigger issues is they charged my card before I literally had any notice what the bill was - it wasn't even in the dashboard yet. I would have terminated the script ASAP had I gotten *any* warning.

Comment · 2 years ago
yeah, but don't "eat up your quota" seems rather tame, whereas "you can get billed $14k with no warning" is the truth.

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