A narrow opening, typically vertical or diagonal, into which something fits, such as a coin slot in a machine. Also: A position in a series or sequence; an assignment.
In computing, a slot (also known as an expansion slot) is a place in the motherboard of a computer into which you can insert an add-on card with circuitry that provides specialized capability, such as video acceleration or disk drive control. Most modern desktop computers have one or more expansion slots.
Some people believe that a slot machine that has been cold will pay out more often after a hot streak. This is incorrect because slot machines have a random number generator that determines whether or not a spin is a winner. It doesn’t matter how many times a particular symbol appears on the reels—or even how close it is to another symbol—the probability of that combination is still very low.
In BigQuery, slots represent virtual CPUs that your queries use to process data. You can purchase slots using the capacity-based pricing model, which allows you to reserve a fixed amount of query processing capacity. Alternatively, you can purchase slot commitments, which provide you with guaranteed capacity on demand for an annual period. When you purchase a commitment, a default reservation named Default is created automatically as a convenience for you. You can create additional reservations to separate resources for different types of workloads, so that production workloads don’t compete with test or development workloads for the same set of resources.