A narrow depression, perforation, or aperture, especially one for the reception of a piece fitting or sliding in it. Often used in the sense of position within a group, series, or sequence.

In a slot machine, a player inserts cash or, in “ticket-in, ticket-out” machines, a paper ticket with a barcode into the designated slot, which activates the machine. The reels then spin, and when a winning combination is displayed, the player earns credits based on the paytable. Symbols vary from machine to machine, but classic symbols include fruits, bells, and stylized lucky sevens. Most slots have a theme, and bonus features align with the theme.

When a query needs more capacity than is available, the system can borrow slots from other executing jobs to reduce future delay. The borrowed slots are not charged to your account, and are excluded from reported slot usage. This capability allows you to allocate resources in a way that makes sense for your organization. For example, you can create a reservation named prod for production workloads, and another reservation for testing, so that the same resources aren’t competing for each other. You can also use reservations to manage costs by setting capacity-based pricing. For more information, see article on capacity-based pricing. You can also use regular expressions to map values to slot types. This feature is useful if you want to use a single slot type for multiple purposes, such as matching flight codes.