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Comment by ktamura | Hacker News Reader

Before this thread turns into a vim-v-emacs-esque flame war.

I really think it's a good thing that AWS and GCP are punching each other in the cloud data warehousing market. It means that the market is maturing, and we are all benefiting from their arms race against each other.

I am of the opinion that Redshift and BigQuery are philosophically different enough that performance differences, while important, shouldn't be the deciding factor. I've written about this in a blog post awhile back, and it might be relevant for folks weighing their options

https://blog.treasuredata.com/blog/2016/06/09/redshift-bigqu...

Disclosures:

1. I don't work at either.

2. My employer, however, partners with both.

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I agree that they were both created with different problem domains. I mainly take issue with the fact that they selected a single query in a large benchmarking suite and used that to claim that BigQuery was categorically better than redshift. Hell, I actually really like BigQuery! I do find the pricing for queries a tad opaque and difficult to estimate... and the variability in performance is fine for my pet projects but I imagine a larger enterprise would prefer something more predictable. I agree with your statement that they are two very very different products. I enjoyed reading your post.

Disclosures: I wrote the parent article.

> I do find the pricing for queries a tad opaque and difficult to estimate

BigQuery just introduced flat-rate pricing for this exact reason: https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/pricing#flat_rate_pricing

Disclosure: I work for Google Cloud

Yeah, this is a great move. That said, again, here's the philosophical difference: with BQ, you need to "Contact your sales representative if you are interested in flat-rate pricing". There's nothing wrong with this, but it reflects their philosophy that compute should be something pay-per-use, not pay-to-procure.

Again, I expect this "talk to sales" part to change in the future as BQ matures, but I imagine this kind of CIO friendly thinking to be new (if not de-prioritized) at Google.

You're still dealing with query slots though -- which remains difficult to estimate. As far as I know the only way to figure that out is to actually run the query and then check how many slots it used. Am I wrong? I'm certainly not a BigQuery expert.

If you're downvoting do you mind leaving a comment on why I'm wrong? I'm interested in knowing more. The documentation for BigQuery doesn't really explain how slots are allocated and what they're capable of.

Best part is that what you get for a slot can and does change over time.

Umm, you didn't even opine on anything. Why would it matter where you work to anyone? All this "disclosing" is annoying.

Disclosures: I don't disclose things when it makes no sense to.

When you promote, or generally talk about a product, it is good manner to disclose your affiliation to it.

Don't shit on people for being polite.

Edit: That said, it works a lot better on reddit with flairs.

When you promote, or generally talk about a product, it is good manner to disclose your affiliation to it.

Nonsense. In what way does this help the reader? Facts are facts, whether they come from a Google employee or a clown. He/she didn't share an opinion that needs to be taken with a grain of salt.

Great article. Data driven.

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