BigQuery vs Bigtable
Last Updated: 2022-01-31
Both are from Google. The names are so close and quite confusing, but they are totally different products.
(Note that Bigtable is NOT styled as BigTable, though the Q
in BigQuery is in uppercase.)
Different use cases
- BigQuery is a data warehouse. SQL. Primarily used for offline analytics. Optimized for large-scale, ad-hoc SQL-based analysis and reporting.
- Bigtable is a wide-column database. NoSQL. Primarily used for online serving. Optimized for low latency, high throughput.
Both offered on Google Cloud Platform
- BigQuery is a service on GCP. It was developed from a Google internal query system called Dremel.
- Bigtable is the name of the database, GCP offers a version of it called Cloud Bigtable.
Competitors
- BigQuery: AWS Redshift, Snowflake, and other data warehouses.
- Bigtable: HBase, Cassandra (actually these open-source projects are based on the published Bigtable design).
Popularity
BigQuery is probably the most popular GCP product.
On DB-Engine ranking (https://db-engines.com/en/ranking):
- BigQuery is ranked 20+ and trending upwards;
- Bigtable is ranked 80+; do not expect it to rise up though, it is being replaced by Spanner.