Google’s Bigtable vs BigQuery: Detailed Comparison, Examples & Characteristics

Google's BigQuery and Bigtable make it easier to explore the world of open data. Data is becoming increasingly important, and the more data you have, the better. Big data provides a broader scope of research, which can be very helpful in making informed decisions. However, getting your hands on large datasets can be quite difficult. With extensive data comes several complexities that make a Data Scientist's job even more complicated. There are many factors that come into play, making it very difficult to access such information. In this article, you'll learn about the key differences between Bigtable and BigQuery. With these tools, you can easily access large datasets and make use of them for your research.

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Introduction to BigQuery

A  fully managed, serverless SQL data warehouse, BigQuery is a robust business intelligence platform that offers speedy SQL queries and interactive analysis of large datasets. Other major public cloud providers offer data warehouse solutions that are comparable to BigQuery, such as Amazon Web Services' Redshift or Microsoft's Azure SQL Data Warehouse. However, BigQuery stands out as a leading solution due to its fully managed and serverless architecture. This makes it a scalable and cost-effective option for businesses of all sizes.

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Introduction to Bigtable

Bigtable is a distributed storage system for managing structured data that is designed to scale to a very large size. It is a column-oriented database, which means that data is organised into columns instead of rows. Bigtable can be used to store any type of data, but it is often used for storing large amounts of data that need to be indexed quickly, such as web crawls, financial data, and scientific data. Bigtable is designed to handle millions of reads and writes per second and petabytes of data.

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It is the underlying storage system for many Google services, such as Gmail, Google Earth, and Google Maps. Bigtable was developed by Google and released as an open-source project in October 2015. Bigtable is a petabyte-scale, fully managed NoSQL database service that is well-suited for storing large amounts of single-keyed data with low latency. You can use Bigtable to quickly index, query, and analyse enormous volumes of data. Additionally, its high read and write throughput makes it an ideal data source for MapReduce. With Bigtable, you can easily scale to serve millions of users.

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Google’s Bigtable vs BigQuery: A Comprehensive Comparison

• OLTP vs OLAP

• SQL vs NoSQL

• Bigtable vs BigQuery

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OLTP vs OLAP

When you looking at different database systems, it's important to know the difference between OLTP and OLAP.

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1. OLTP (Online Transaction Processing):

This type of database system is designed to support transaction-oriented applications. The main purpose of an OLTP database is to insert, update, and delete data as fast as possible. In general, an OLTP database will have a large number of small tables with a limited number of records in each table.

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2. OLAP (Online Analytical Processing):

This type of database is designed for data warehousing and business intelligence applications. The main purpose of an OLAP database is to support fast query performance for complex analytical queries. In general, an OLAP database will have a small number of large tables with a large number of records in each table.

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SQL vs NoSQL

When you're looking at different database systems, it's also important to know the difference between SQL and NoSQL.

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1. SQL (Structured Query Language):

SQL databases use a "relational schema" to organize data into tables, rows, and columns. This schema allows for easy manipulation of data using SQL. SQL databases are vertically scalable, meaning that they can handle increased loads by adding more resources like CPU, memory, or disk space. This makes SQL databases ideal for applications that need to be able to handle large amounts of data or high-traffic loads.

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2. NoSQL (Not Only SQL):

NoSQL databases do not use a "relational schema" to organize data. Instead, they use a "document-oriented" or "key-value" schema. This schema allows for more flexible data modeling and easier scalability. NoSQL databases are horizontally scalable, meaning that they can handle increased loads by adding more servers. This makes NoSQL databases ideal for applications that need to be able to handle large numbers of users or high-traffic loads.

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Bigtable vs BigQuery

Google's Bigtable and BigQuery are two of the most popular database systems available today. Both are fully managed, serverless, and offer fast query performance. However, there are some key differences between these two systems.

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1. BigQuery

Data in BigQuery is immutable, meaning it cannot be changed or deleted after it has been uploaded. If a record needs to be modified, the entire partition that contains that record must be rewritten. This append-only design helps reduce storage costs by automatically removing partitions that are older than the configured time to live.

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2. Bigtable

Bigtable is a scalable, sorted key/value map that organizes data into tables. This allows for quick key-based lookups and changeable data. Each column has separate values for each row, and each row normally defines a single object. Regardless of how many columns are read or written within a row, read and write operations on data to rows are atomic. This makes Bigtable a powerful tool for managing large amounts of data.

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Characteristics of Cloud Bigtable

Your application can scale massively with Bigtable, a NoSQL database designed to support large-scale applications. With Bigtable, you can easily add or remove nodes to adjust throughput - each node provides up to 10,000 queries per second (read and write). This makes Bigtable an ideal storage engine for low-latency applications that require high throughput, as well as for data-intensive processing and analytics. Bigtable offers high availability, with an SLA of 99.5% for zonal instances. And it's not just scalable but also consistent - replication across two clusters adds eventual consistency and increases the SLA to 99.99%. 

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So if you need a database that can handle anything your application throws at it, Bigtable is the way to go. It is a key-value store designed to handle large amounts of data. You can use it to store billions of rows and thousands of columns worth of data. Cloud Bigtable is great for machine learning predictions because it can handle large amounts of data per row or item. It integrates easily with existing big data tools, such as Hadoop, Dataflow, and Dataproc. Plus, it supports the open-source HBase API standard to easily integrate with the Apache ecosystem.

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Characteristics of BigQuery

On the other hand, BigQuery is a powerful data warehouse designed for easy ingestion, storage, analysis, and visualization of large data sets. You can upload data into BigQuery in batches or stream it in real-time to get timely insights. BigQuery supports a standard SQL dialect that is ANSI-compliant, so if you already know SQL, you will be able to use it without any problem. In most cases, you would use Cloud Bigtable as the database for your applications, but BigQuery is more suited for analytics.

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When your data is in BigQuery, you can start querying it using SQL. BigQuery is ideal for queries that require scanning a large table or looking across an entire dataset. This can include aggregations such as sums, averages, counts, and groupings, as well as machine learning models. You can use BigQuery for online analytical processing (OLAP) to support large-scale storage and analysis.

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Conclusion

In conclusion, BigQuery is a powerful data warehouse solution that is easy to use and offers fast SQL queries. It is ideal for analytics and OLAP. On the other hand, Cloud Bigtable is a NoSQL database designed for large-scale applications. It offers high availability and scalability. If you need a database that can handle anything your application throws at it, Bigtable is the way to go. You can use our platform, Boltic, for easy data management on both Bigtable and BigQuery. With Boltic, you can easily migrate data from one platform to the other or keep your data synchronised in real time. Try it out for free today! We are sure that you will find our service useful.

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