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BigQuery was one of the first decoupled storage and compute architectures. It is a unique piece of engineering and not a typical data warehouse in part because it started as an on-demand serverless query engine. It runs in multi-tenancy with shared resources, allocated as “slots” which represent a virtual CPU that executes SQL. BigQuery determines how many slots a query requires, without the ability of the user to control it. BigQuery can be priced on a $/TB scanned basis or through slot reservations. A slot in BigQuery is logically equivalent to 0.5 vCPU and 0.5GB of RAM. There are multiple models to allocate slots in BigQuery.
Druid is an OLAP engine designed to provide fast real time analytics. Druid adopts a clustered architecture with servers that host various role specific processes. These processes address real time and batch ingestion, indexing, querying of historical and real time data. Apache Druid can be deployed as a virtual machine or a Kubernetes based cluster. Druid does not support a decoupled compute & storage architecture. Deep storage in the form of object storage is used to replicate data to.
BigQuery scales very well to large data volumes, and automatically assigns more compute resources when needed behind the scenes, in the form of “slots”. BigQuery works either in an “on-demand pricing model”, where slot assignment is completely in the hands of BigQuery and the state of the shared resource pool, or in “flat-rate pricing model” where slots are reserved in advance. With reserved slots there is more control over compute resources, thus making scaling more predictable. Concurrency is limited to 100 users by default.
Druid provides the ability to handle fast ingest and high concurrency. Custom sizing and cluster tuning are required to balance the compute, memory, storage needs of each process within Druid and to provide high concurrency. Druid clusters can be grown by adding nodes with automatic rebalancing of storage segments assigned to nodes. Self hosted Druid on Kubernetes is an option that users leverage to simplify scaling. Additionally, Cloud based managed Druid offerings are being rolled out. However, these managed offerings are limited in scale and scaling is not granular.
BigQuery lines up in benchmarks in the same ballpark as other cloud data warehouses but does come in consistently last in most queries. Beyond implementing according to best practices, there is little you can do to accelerate BigQuery performance, as it determines the amount of resources (slots) the query needs for you. BigQuery can be used together with the “BigQuery BI Engine” for lower latency analytics. However, BI Engine is limited in terms of scale because it runs in memory. Its maximum capacity is 100GB.
Druid provides high performance through columnar storage format, parallel processing, bitmap indexes and roll-ups. Druid, however, recommends a denormalized data model for performance needs. Join operations in Druid are a relatively new feature with various limitations, especially if there is a need to join large datasets.
BigQuery is a mature general-purpose data warehouse, which lends itself well to internal BI & reporting. The fact that it’s serverless in nature and tightly integrated with GCP, makes it very convenient for Ad-Hoc analytics and ML use cases on GCP. On the other hand, because BigQuery makes resource allocation decisions for you, it is not always the best fit for operational use cases and Data Apps where performance needs to be consistent and predictable.
Druid is designed as an OLAP engine to provide fast access to aggregations that are run against large volumes of data. Druid is typically used for customer facing analytics and streaming data processing. Druid is used as an add-on with other data warehousing products that are efficient at scaling, joining, and filtering large volumes of data. It is not a suitable option for data warehouse replacement.
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