Best Query Engines for Cloud

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.

Snowflake is a comprehensive AI Data Cloud platform designed to eliminate data silos and simplify data architectures, enabling organizations to get more value from their data. The platform offers interoperable storage that provides near-infinite scale and access to diverse data sources, both inside and outside Snowflake. Its elastic compute engine delivers high performance for any number of users, workloads, and data volumes with seamless scalability. Snowflake’s Cortex AI accelerates enterprise AI by providing secure access to leading large language models (LLMs) and data chat services. The platform’s cloud services automate complex resource management, ensuring reliability and cost efficiency. Trusted by over 11,000 global customers across industries, Snowflake helps businesses collaborate on data, build data applications, and maintain a competitive edge.

Amazon Athena is an interactive query service that makes it easy to analyze data in Amazon S3 using standard SQL. Athena is serverless, so there is no infrastructure to manage, and you pay only for the queries that you run. Athena is easy to use. Simply point to your data in Amazon S3, define the schema, and start querying using standard SQL. Most results are delivered within seconds. With Athena, there’s no need for complex ETL jobs to prepare your data for analysis. This makes it easy for anyone with SQL skills to quickly analyze large-scale datasets. Athena is out-of-the-box integrated with AWS Glue Data Catalog, allowing you to create a unified metadata repository across various services, crawl data sources to discover schemas and populate your Catalog with new and modified table and partition definitions, and maintain schema versioning.

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.

Starburst helps you make better decisions with fast access to all your data; Without the complexity of data movement and copies. Your company has more data than ever before, but your data teams are stuck waiting to analyze it. Starburst unlocks access to data where it lives, no data movement required, giving your teams fast & accurate access to more data for analysis. Starburst Enterprise is a fully supported, production-tested and enterprise-grade distribution of open source Trino (formerly Presto® SQL). It improves performance and security while making it easy to deploy, connect, and manage your Trino environment. Through connecting to any source of data – whether it’s located on-premise, in the cloud, or across a hybrid cloud environment – Starburst lets your team use the analytics tools they already know & love while accessing data that lives anywhere.

Quasar's brain is QuasarDB, a high-performance, distributed, column-oriented timeseries database management system designed from the ground up to deliver real-time on petascale use cases. Up to 20X less disk usage. Quasardb ingestion and compression capabilities are unmatched. Up to 10,000X faster feature extraction. QuasarDB can extract features in real-time from the raw data, thanks to the combination of a built-in map/reduce query engine, an aggregation engine that leverages SIMD from modern CPUs, and stochastic indexes that use virtually no disk space. The most cost-effective timeseries solution, thanks to its ultra-efficient resource usage, the capability to leverage object storage (S3), unique compression technology, and fair pricing model. Quasar runs everywhere, from 32-bit ARM devices to high-end Intel servers, from Edge Computing to the cloud or on-premises.

Processing and storing tabular datasets, e.g. from CSV or Parquet files. Large result set transfer to client. Large client/server installations for centralized enterprise data warehousing. Writing to a single database from multiple concurrent processes. DuckDB is a relational database management system (RDBMS). That means it is a system for managing data stored in relations. A relation is essentially a mathematical term for a table. Each table is a named collection of rows. Each row of a given table has the same set of named columns, and each column is of a specific data type. Tables themselves are stored inside schemas, and a collection of schemas constitutes the entire database that you can access.

Now that your data is in motion, it’s time to make sense of it. Stream processing enables you to derive instant insights from your data streams, but setting up the infrastructure to support it can be complex. That’s why Confluent developed ksqlDB, the database purpose-built for stream processing applications. Make your data immediately actionable by continuously processing streams of data generated throughout your business. ksqlDB’s intuitive syntax lets you quickly access and augment data in Kafka, enabling development teams to seamlessly create real-time innovative customer experiences and fulfill data-driven operational needs. ksqlDB offers a single solution for collecting streams of data, enriching them, and serving queries on new derived streams and tables. That means less infrastructure to deploy, maintain, scale, and secure. With less moving parts in your data architecture, you can focus on what really matters -- innovation.