Best Free Query Engines

BigQuery features a highly optimized query engine that can handle large-scale queries on vast datasets with remarkable speed and efficiency. Its serverless architecture allows businesses to perform high-performance queries without the need for managing infrastructure or servers. BigQuery’s SQL-based query engine is familiar to most data analysts, making it easy to get started with complex data analysis. New customers can explore the query engine with $300 in free credits, enabling them to run a variety of queries and assess how BigQuery can support their analytical needs. The platform is also designed for scalability, ensuring that query performance remains consistent even as data grows.

StarTree, powered by Apache Pinot™, is a fully managed real-time analytics platform built for customer-facing applications that demand instant insights on the freshest data. Unlike traditional data warehouses or OLTP databases—optimized for back-office reporting or transactions—StarTree is engineered for real-time OLAP at true scale, meaning: - Data Volume: query performance sustained at petabyte scale - Ingest Rates: millions of events per second, continuously indexed for freshness - Concurrency: thousands to millions of simultaneous users served with sub-second latency With StarTree, businesses deliver always-fresh insights at interactive speed, enabling applications that personalize, monitor, and act in real time.

Trino is a query engine that runs at ludicrous speed. Fast-distributed SQL query engine for big data analytics that helps you explore your data universe. Trino is a highly parallel and distributed query engine, that is built from the ground up for efficient, low-latency analytics. The largest organizations in the world use Trino to query exabyte-scale data lakes and massive data warehouses alike. Supports diverse use cases, ad-hoc analytics at interactive speeds, massive multi-hour batch queries, and high-volume apps that perform sub-second queries. Trino is an ANSI SQL-compliant query engine, that works with BI tools such as R, Tableau, Power BI, Superset, and many others. You can natively query data in Hadoop, S3, Cassandra, MySQL, and many others, without the need for complex, slow, and error-prone processes for copying the data. Access data from multiple systems within a single query.

Tabular is an open table store from the creators of Apache Iceberg. Connect multiple computing engines and frameworks. Decrease query time and storage costs by up to 50%. Centralize enforcement of data access (RBAC) policies. Connect any query engine or framework, including Athena, BigQuery, Redshift, Snowflake, Databricks, Trino, Spark, and Python. Smart compaction, clustering, and other automated data services reduce storage costs and query times by up to 50%. Unify data access at the database or table. RBAC controls are simple to manage, consistently enforced, and easy to audit. Centralize your security down to the table. Tabular is easy to use plus it features high-powered ingestion, performance, and RBAC under the hood. Tabular gives you the flexibility to work with multiple “best of breed” compute engines based on their strengths. Assign privileges at the data warehouse database, table, or column level.

R2 SQL is Cloudflare’s serverless, distributed analytics query engine (currently in open beta) that enables you to run SQL queries over Apache Iceberg tables stored in R2 Data Catalog without needing to manage your own compute clusters. It is built to efficiently query large volumes of data by leveraging metadata pruning, partition-level statistics, file and row-group filtering, and Cloudflare’s globally distributed compute infrastructure to parallelize execution. The system works by integrating with R2 object storage and an Iceberg catalog layer, so you can ingest data via Cloudflare Pipelines into Iceberg tables, and then query that data with minimal overhead. Queries can be issued via the Wrangler CLI or HTTP API (with an API token granting permissions across R2 SQL, Data Catalog, and storage). During the open beta period, using R2 SQL itself is not billed, only storage and standard R2 operations incur charges.

Parallel query engine with time- and symbol-indexed data access. Extended SQL syntax with advanced filtering and aggregations. Consolidate quotes, trades, snapshots, and reference data in one place. Strategy backtesting on high-frequency data. Quantitative and market microstructure research. Granular transaction cost analysis and rollup reporting. Market surveillance and anomaly detection. Non-transparent ETF/ETN decomposition. FAST, SBE, and proprietary protocols. Plain text protocol. Consolidated and direct feeds. Built-in latency monitoring tools. End-of-day archives. ETL from institutional and retail financial data platforms. Parallel SQL engine with syntax extensions. Advanced filtering by trading session, auction stage, index composition. Optimized aggregates for OHLCV and VWAP calculations. Interactive SQL console with auto-completion. API endpoint for programmatic integration. Scheduled SQL reporting with email, file, and web delivery. JDBC and ODBC drivers.

Don’t let app, device, or game crashes get in the way of a great experience. Backtrace takes all the manual labor out of cross-platform crash and exception management so you can focus on shipping. Cross-platform callstack and event aggregation and monitoring. Process errors from panics, core dumps, minidumps, and during runtime across your stack with a single system. Backtrace generates structured, searchable error reports from your data. Automated analysis cuts down on time to resolution by surfacing important signals that lead engineers to crash root cause. Never worry about missing a clue with rich integrations into dashboards, notification, and workflow systems. Answer the questions that matter to you with Backtrace’s rich query engine. View a high-level overview of error frequency, prioritization, and trends across all your projects. Search through key data points and your own custom data across all your errors.

A hybrid SQL-on-Hadoop engine delivering advanced, security-rich data query across enterprise big data sources, including Hadoop, object storage and data warehouses. IBM Db2 Big SQL is an enterprise-grade, hybrid ANSI-compliant SQL-on-Hadoop engine, delivering massively parallel processing (MPP) and advanced data query. Db2 Big SQL offers a single database connection or query for disparate sources such as Hadoop HDFS and WebHDFS, RDMS, NoSQL databases, and object stores. Benefit from low latency, high performance, data security, SQL compatibility, and federation capabilities to do ad hoc and complex queries. Db2 Big SQL is now available in 2 variations. It can be integrated with Cloudera Data Platform, or accessed as a cloud-native service on the IBM Cloud Pak® for Data platform. Access and analyze data and perform queries on batch and real-time data across sources, like Hadoop, object stores and data warehouses.

Rich interactive visualizations for identifying patterns in user and business flows, with full visibility into underlying computation. A small set of sequence operations providing full expressivity and fine-grained control in under 10 lines of code. An incremental query engine to seamlessly trade between query precision, speed and cost according to your needs. Currently Motif uses a tiny custom-built DSL called Sequence Operations Language (SOL), which we believe is more natural to use than SQL and more powerful than a drag-and-drop interface. We built a custom engine to optimize sequence queries and are also trading off precision, which goes unused in decision-making, for query speed.

The Databricks Data Intelligence Platform allows your entire organization to use data and AI. It’s built on a lakehouse to provide an open, unified foundation for all data and governance, and is powered by a Data Intelligence Engine that understands the uniqueness of your data. The winners in every industry will be data and AI companies. From ETL to data warehousing to generative AI, Databricks helps you simplify and accelerate your data and AI goals. Databricks combines generative AI with the unification benefits of a lakehouse to power a Data Intelligence Engine that understands the unique semantics of your data. This allows the Databricks Platform to automatically optimize performance and manage infrastructure in ways unique to your business. The Data Intelligence Engine understands your organization’s language, so search and discovery of new data is as easy as asking a question like you would to a coworker.

Qubole is a simple, open, and secure Data Lake Platform for machine learning, streaming, and ad-hoc analytics. Our platform provides end-to-end services that reduce the time and effort required to run Data pipelines, Streaming Analytics, and Machine Learning workloads on any cloud. No other platform offers the openness and data workload flexibility of Qubole while lowering cloud data lake costs by over 50 percent. Qubole delivers faster access to petabytes of secure, reliable and trusted datasets of structured and unstructured data for Analytics and Machine Learning. Users conduct ETL, analytics, and AI/ML workloads efficiently in end-to-end fashion across best-of-breed open source engines, multiple formats, libraries, and languages adapted to data volume, variety, SLAs and organizational policies.

Apache Spark™ is a unified analytics engine for large-scale data processing. Apache Spark achieves high performance for both batch and streaming data, using a state-of-the-art DAG scheduler, a query optimizer, and a physical execution engine. Spark offers over 80 high-level operators that make it easy to build parallel apps. And you can use it interactively from the Scala, Python, R, and SQL shells. Spark powers a stack of libraries including SQL and DataFrames, MLlib for machine learning, GraphX, and Spark Streaming. You can combine these libraries seamlessly in the same application. Spark runs on Hadoop, Apache Mesos, Kubernetes, standalone, or in the cloud. It can access diverse data sources. You can run Spark using its standalone cluster mode, on EC2, on Hadoop YARN, on Mesos, or on Kubernetes. Access data in HDFS, Alluxio, Apache Cassandra, Apache HBase, Apache Hive, and hundreds of other data sources.