# Google BigQuery

26 Hacker News commenters recommended Google BigQuery and 9 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 10 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** People recommend BigQuery for big SQL analytics without running infrastructure, and it has a free tier. The most common caveat is query cost, which can run up large bills.

## Why people recommend it

- Managed, no infrastructure to run (4 comments): "Makes it easy to get BQ/Clickhouse like performance without running or paying for that infrastructure." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48113859)) "They'll handle all scale, including region replication, backups." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46690748)) "You use the cloud provider service provided (BigQuery or AWS Athena for example)." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46668051))
- Reliable and best-in-class in practice (3 comments): "For production analytics with concurrent users + strict isolation, Redshift/BQ still win on reliability" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46666419)) "Bigquery was also one of the biggest wins in my previous role." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47083747)) "BigQuery, Spanner, Pub/Sub, GKE are all best-in-class." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50294327))
- Cheap storage and economical wide events (2 comments): "dumping everything into BigQuery as a wide event can be the most economical" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50235649)) "I liken it to the BigQuery cost model, where storage is effectively free." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49160213))

## What people warn about

- Query costs can be high (3 comments): "I am not going to pay for the query on Google BigQuery to answer it, not after I spent $3k by accident last time" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47188127)) "the cold start + query cost model of serverless warehouses can be painful for API-serving use cases" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47526016)) "requiring stuff such as BigQuery which is expensive" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46436488))
- Added limits and restrictions over time (2 comments): "start with an amazing engineering product, and keep continuously degrading the value users get out of a fixed dollar spend" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48204335)) "before they smothered it with more and more limits and restrictions" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47741826))
- Jobs failed randomly, causing trouble (2 comments): "when BigQuery jobs started to fail randomly, causing huge trouble producing critical reports" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46853311)) "that doesn't make up the disaster that was BigQuery" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47624390))
- Slow queries and poor point lookups (2 comments): "after one hour, only about 3% was done" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48786537)) "BigQuery's poor point lookups" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47827803))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Snowflake](https://hackerapproved.com/p/snowflake.md): 26 recommend
- [Databricks](https://hackerapproved.com/p/databricks.md): 20 recommend
- [Amazon Athena](https://hackerapproved.com/p/amazon-athena.md): 13 recommend
- [MotherDuck](https://hackerapproved.com/p/motherduck.md): 5 recommend

## Where to get it

- [Visit the official site](https://cloud.google.com/bigquery)

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Google BigQuery", https://hackerapproved.com/p/bigquery/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).