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  1. Stackups
  2. Application & Data
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  4. Big Data As A Service
  5. Azure Synapse vs Google BigQuery

Azure Synapse vs Google BigQuery

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Google BigQuery
Google BigQuery
Stacks1.8K
Followers1.5K
Votes152
Azure Synapse
Azure Synapse
Stacks104
Followers230
Votes10

Azure Synapse vs Google BigQuery: What are the differences?

Introduction

Azure Synapse and Google BigQuery are two popular cloud-based data warehouse solutions that offer fast and scalable data analytics capabilities. While they serve similar purposes, there are key differences between them that make them suitable for different use cases.

  1. Integration and Ecosystem: Azure Synapse is tightly integrated with the broader Azure ecosystem, providing seamless integration with other Azure services such as Azure Data Factory, Azure Machine Learning, and Power BI. On the other hand, Google BigQuery is part of the Google Cloud Platform (GCP), which offers a wide range of complementary services such as Google Dataflow and Google Cloud Storage.

  2. Performance and Concurrency: Azure Synapse offers dedicated SQL pools, allowing users to provision dedicated compute and storage resources for specific workloads. This provides better performance and higher concurrency for complex queries. In contrast, Google BigQuery uses an architecture that automatically scales resources based on demand, providing a serverless experience. While this offers ease of use and scalability, it may result in slightly lower performance for complex queries.

  3. Pricing Model: Azure Synapse offers a flexible pricing model that allows users to choose between provisioned resources and on-demand serverless options, providing cost optimization based on workload requirements. On the other hand, Google BigQuery uses a pricing model based on usage, where users are billed based on the amount of data processed and the storage used. This can provide cost savings for sporadic or unpredictable workloads.

  4. Data Import and Export: Azure Synapse provides native integrations with various data sources and supports both batch and real-time data ingestion. It offers connectors to common data sources such as Azure Blob Storage, Azure SQL Database, and popular big data frameworks like Apache Kafka and Apache Spark. Google BigQuery also provides various data connectors and supports batch data import/export, but it lacks support for real-time streaming ingestion out of the box.

  5. Data Partitioning and Clustering: Azure Synapse supports data partitioning and clustering, allowing users to optimize query performance by organizing data based on specific columns, reducing the amount of data scanned during query execution. This is especially useful for large datasets. Google BigQuery offers a similar concept called partitioned tables but does not provide native support for data clustering, requiring users to manually organize data to achieve similar optimizations.

  6. Machine Learning Capabilities: Azure Synapse provides integration with Azure Machine Learning, allowing users to build, train, and deploy machine learning models directly from the platform. Additionally, it offers built-in support for automated machine learning and model explainability. Google BigQuery also offers integration with Google Cloud AI Platform, providing similar machine learning capabilities. However, it does not have built-in support for automated machine learning.

In summary, Azure Synapse and Google BigQuery differ in terms of integration with their respective cloud ecosystems, flexibility in pricing models, performance and concurrency options, support for data import/export, data optimization techniques, and machine learning capabilities. The choice between them depends on specific requirements, preferences, and existing cloud platform investments.

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Detailed Comparison

Google BigQuery
Google BigQuery
Azure Synapse
Azure Synapse

Run super-fast, SQL-like queries against terabytes of data in seconds, using the processing power of Google's infrastructure. Load data with ease. Bulk load your data using Google Cloud Storage or stream it in. Easy access. Access BigQuery by using a browser tool, a command-line tool, or by making calls to the BigQuery REST API with client libraries such as Java, PHP or Python.

It is an analytics service that brings together enterprise data warehousing and Big Data analytics. It gives you the freedom to query data on your terms, using either serverless on-demand or provisioned resources—at scale. It brings these two worlds together with a unified experience to ingest, prepare, manage, and serve data for immediate BI and machine learning needs.

All behind the scenes- Your queries can execute asynchronously in the background, and can be polled for status.;Import data with ease- Bulk load your data using Google Cloud Storage or stream it in bursts of up to 1,000 rows per second.;Affordable big data- The first Terabyte of data processed each month is free.;The right interface- Separate interfaces for administration and developers will make sure that you have access to the tools you need.
Complete T-SQL based analytics – Generally Available; Deeply integrated Apache Spark; Hybrid data integration; Unified user experience
Statistics
Stacks
1.8K
Stacks
104
Followers
1.5K
Followers
230
Votes
152
Votes
10
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 28
    High Performance
  • 25
    Easy to use
  • 22
    Fully managed service
  • 19
    Cheap Pricing
  • 16
    Process hundreds of GB in seconds
Cons
  • 1
    You can't unit test changes in BQ data
  • 0
    Sdas
Pros
  • 4
    ETL
  • 3
    Security
  • 2
    Serverless
  • 1
    Doesn't support cross database query
Cons
  • 1
    Dictionary Size Limitation - CCI
  • 1
    Concurrency
Integrations
Xplenty
Xplenty
Fluentd
Fluentd
Looker
Looker
Chartio
Chartio
Treasure Data
Treasure Data
No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Google BigQuery, Azure Synapse?

Metabase

Metabase

It is an easy way to generate charts and dashboards, ask simple ad hoc queries without using SQL, and see detailed information about rows in your Database. You can set it up in under 5 minutes, and then give yourself and others a place to ask simple questions and understand the data your application is generating.

Apache Spark

Apache Spark

Spark is a fast and general processing engine compatible with Hadoop data. It can run in Hadoop clusters through YARN or Spark's standalone mode, and it can process data in HDFS, HBase, Cassandra, Hive, and any Hadoop InputFormat. It is designed to perform both batch processing (similar to MapReduce) and new workloads like streaming, interactive queries, and machine learning.

Amazon Redshift

Amazon Redshift

It is optimized for data sets ranging from a few hundred gigabytes to a petabyte or more and costs less than $1,000 per terabyte per year, a tenth the cost of most traditional data warehousing solutions.

Qubole

Qubole

Qubole is a cloud based service that makes big data easy for analysts and data engineers.

Presto

Presto

Distributed SQL Query Engine for Big Data

Amazon EMR

Amazon EMR

It is used in a variety of applications, including log analysis, data warehousing, machine learning, financial analysis, scientific simulation, and bioinformatics.

Amazon Athena

Amazon Athena

Amazon Athena is an interactive query service that makes it easy to analyze data in Amazon S3 using standard SQL. Athena is serverless, so there is no infrastructure to manage, and you pay only for the queries that you run.

Superset

Superset

Superset's main goal is to make it easy to slice, dice and visualize data. It empowers users to perform analytics at the speed of thought.

Apache Flink

Apache Flink

Apache Flink is an open source system for fast and versatile data analytics in clusters. Flink supports batch and streaming analytics, in one system. Analytical programs can be written in concise and elegant APIs in Java and Scala.

lakeFS

lakeFS

It is an open-source data version control system for data lakes. It provides a “Git for data” platform enabling you to implement best practices from software engineering on your data lake, including branching and merging, CI/CD, and production-like dev/test environments.

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