Bigquery Review

Last updated: October 2 2024

Bigquery is a data warehouse from Google that allows users to store and perform analytics on structured and semi structured data. In some situations, I prefer it over my overall #1 data warehouse, Snowflake.

Bigquery may have been the first generally available, cloud-native analytics database service that separated storage from compute. In my opinion, their implementation of the concept is excellent, and GCP users should analyze whether their pricing model is preferable to Snowflake’s (it might be!)

Pros

• It is a modern data warehouse that offers great performance on analytical queries, and separates storage from compute.
• While Bigquery itself doesn’t have the ability to create business intelligence dashboards in its UI, Looker Studio is free and integrates seamlessly.
• The Bigquery docs are very good.
• Can be very cost effective if you’re careful with your usage patterns.

Cons

• It is not multi cloud.
• The pricing model is based on data scanned, not runtime. This can lead to huge surprise bills.
  • There is an option to price Bigquery with a concept called slots… But I have yet to figure that pricing system out. The explainer page has headlines like Query execution under slot resource economy… Lol, get it together, Google! No one understands what that means!
• GCP’s ELT tool relies on Apache Beam and has never impressed me. I’ve built a simple ELT tool myself, so I know it isn’t that hard. Google definitely has the talent and resources to build a better one. Then again, Snowflake doesn’t have an ELT tool either.