Finding a “one-size-fits-all” enterprise data warehouse (EDW) is all but impossible. Massive, on-premises EDW solutions have reigned supreme for decades and continue to serve as the backbone for many successful organizations. More recently, the agility and flexibility offered by modern, cloud-based EDWs have allowed businesses to analyze new and different data sets on a whim, offering the potential to optimize internal operations, reduce risk, and open the door to many new business opportunities. Further, recent ESG research shows that EDWs are the top analytics service leveraged in the public cloud. Whether you are looking to fully migrate your on-premises EDW solution into the cloud or augment your on-premises EDW with some cloud-based services to investigate new opportunities, it is important to understand the difference between offerings in the market.
ESG has evaluated numerous Google data analytics services from a technical and economic perspective over the past few years. The latest in the series has just been completed, with the report comparing the economics of Google BigQuery with three competing cloud-based EDW solutions.
We compared the cost and capabilities of Google BigQuery, AWS Redshift, Azure SQL Data Warehouse, and Snowflake. The report concludes that BigQuery can provide a three-year total cost of ownership (TCO) that is 26% to 34% lower than the other three solutions. The bulk of the savings provided by BiqQuery is attributable to the elimination of upfront investment, reduction in management complexity, and native integration with other solutions. This report not only contains helpful cost analysis, but also provides some high level side-by-side comparisons of the solutions.
No matter what cloud-based EDW solution you are currently using or may be planning to use, BigQuery should be on the short list. It offers unique capabilities, such as enabling customers to natively run AI/ML workloads, query external data sets, leverage self-optimizing storage, and natively operate/integrate across a growing number of proven cloud analytics and AI services.
