Data stores & formats
Google BigQuery
Google's serverless cloud warehouse for petabyte-scale analytics.
What is it
Google BigQuery is a fully managed (serverless) analytical data warehouse on Google Cloud. There are no servers to administer: you load data and write SQL, while compute resources are allocated automatically for each query. You pay for the volume of data processed or for reserved slots, with storage billed separately.
Where and why it is used
I use BigQuery when you need to spin up an analytical warehouse quickly without administering infrastructure — especially for projects within the Google ecosystem (GA4, Google Ads, Sheets). It works well as a foundation for end-to-end analytics and data marts feeding dashboards.
Used in my services
Alternatives
SnowflakeAmazon RedshiftClickHouseAzure SynapseDatabricks
Pros and cons
Pros
- Serverless — no administration or clusters
- Scales to petabytes without tuning
- Deep integration with the Google ecosystem (GA4, Ads)
- Fast start, pay-as-you-go pricing
Cons
- – Costs are hard to predict as the number of queries grows
- – Cloud dependency and data-residency considerations
- – Vendor lock-in to Google Cloud
- – Latency on simple queries is higher than ClickHouse
