Decoupling Storage and Compute
Traditional data warehouses required expensive, on-premises hardware that scaled compute and storage together. Modern cloud data warehouses have decoupled storage and compute, allowing businesses to store petabytes of data cheaply and only pay for high-performance computing when running queries.
The two leading platforms are Snowflake and Google Cloud BigQuery.
Key Differences
- Snowflake: Runs across multiple cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP). It offers dedicated virtual warehouses (compute clusters) that can be spun up or down instantly.
- BigQuery: A fully serverless, shared-resource model native to Google Cloud. You do not manage any servers or compute instances; Google allocates resources automatically on a per-query basis.