Snowflake vs BigQuery | What's Different?

snowflake was my introduction to Modern

Cloud databases and it's still where I'd

say I'm most comfortable even today but

this year I've had two clients recently

that needed to use bigquery and I'd

definitely be lying to say that there

wasn't a learning curve trying to go

between the two so in today's video I

want to talk about a few of the lessons

I've learned working uh between the two

the similarities differences so that you

can feel more comfortable working on

either of them so number one is the fact

that bigqueries naming conventions are

unique they're different especially for

somebody coming from a traditional data

warehouse background a SQL server

postgres and now snowflake to me

snowflake is really simple it just makes

sense you have objects like databases

and schemas and all that but when you go

to bigquery you'll see stuff like

project and data set now ultimately

they're they're kind of the same thing

but at first there was a little bit of a

learning curve just figuring out you

know what does that mean so just to make

it even more clear in bigquery a project

is essentially the same as a database

and a data set is the same as a schema

and when you use tools like DBT you're

going to use those interchangeably and

regardless of what you call it on any

platform really the data modeling

Concepts and discussions and approaches

are going to be the same regardless so

just embrace it and just keep a look out

for that now the second thing has to do

with computation and really I'd say even

more so what it means to be serverless

because when you see stuff for Google

bigquery they're talking about how it's

serverless Computing in a serverless

database I didn't really understand

fully what that meant I'd say until I

started working with it more and the

biggest place that I saw this is with

computation so if you're familiar with

snowflake you make different objects for

compute so they'll be called a warehouse

you'll have different ones you could

have extra small large medium depending

on your use case and each of them have

more of a cost have more bandwidth Etc

when you go to bigquery one of the

things you notice is you don't have any

of that you don't do anything with

computation it just Auto scales for you

so if you have more up a workload it's

just going to Auto scale up to meet that

workload and even more specifically here

an example is Auto resuming and auto

suspending on snowflake you have to set

that feature and that that setting or

else you know it'll just keep running

indefinitely but on bigquery that's just

again handled behind the scenes it's

serverless it just spins up and works as

needed there's nothing for you to

configure or set so that's kind of nice

just one less thing to worry about now

the last thing I'll talk about here is

pricing and cost structure they are

different because on snowflake

everything is based around computational

spend and processing time so if you have

a warehouse running for a certain amount

of time that's going to cost x amount of

dollars whereas on bigquery everything

is based on bytes scan so rather than

time it's about the kind of the sheer

volume of data that you're scanning and

there's ways to minimize that on

bigquery which is nice so if you have

things like clusters or partitions it

will make your query engine more

efficient and therefore scan less bytes

which means lower costs on snowflake I

guess you could kind of have a similar

outcome if you had a more optimized

query it doesn't have to run as long and

then it won't cost as much but they are

not exactly the same which again was a

little bit of a learning curve at first

but either way you know as long as you

understand what's going on you can work

around that accordingly so bytes

processed first credits and that's the

difference so as a data engineer it's

important to be well-rounded and be

flexible to work on these different

types of platforms and hopefully this

has helped you a little bit with

understanding the difference between

Snowflake and bigquery thank you as

always for watching and I'll see you at

the next video