Google BigQuery vs. Snowflake
Which Cloud Data Warehouse is the better one?
To take out a bit of suspense, I will not test both systems with certain SQL queries and show you at the end which one is faster and you or your company should buy. But I will show you the differences and where the strengths of each system lie in.
Both systems are designed to make large amounts of data easy to analyze in the age of Big Data. While BigQuery is a Google tool within the Google Cloud Platform, Snowflake has an open structure and can be operated on all major providers.
Scaling and Computing
The two systems can scale very well and can work with Big Data. While BigQuery does this automatically, Snowflake is giving you some configuration possibilities. BigQuery and Snowflake both scale very well for data volumes and query concurrency. The decoupled storage/compute architecture supports resizing clusters without downtime, and in addition, supports auto-scaling horizontally for higher query concurrency during peak hours [1][2].
Performance
In addition to scaling and concurrency between users, the performance of the individual queries is also an important factor in modern Data Warehouses. Who likes to wait minutes or even hours for results these days? As I said, I…
