Google BigQuery
Hacker ApprovedShares rank 2 of 9 cloud data warehouses by recommenders
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.
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.
35 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 26
- criticize it
- 9
- approval share
- 74%
Recommended in 10 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: not recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: not recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it carries the badge
- 26 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 2.9 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 10 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Managed, no infrastructure to run
“Makes it easy to get BQ/Clickhouse like performance without running or paying for that infrastructure.”
Comment from 12 May 2026 in “Quack: The DuckDB Client-Server Protocol” “They'll handle all scale, including region replication, backups.”
Comment from 20 Jan 2026 in “Ask HN: How would you design for this scale today?” “You use the cloud provider service provided (BigQuery or AWS Athena for example).”
Comment from 18 Jan 2026 in “Command-line Tools can be 235x Faster than your Hadoop Cluster (2014)” - Comment from 31 Jan 2026 in “Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native”
Reliable and best-in-class in practice
“For production analytics with concurrent users + strict isolation, Redshift/BQ still win on reliability”
Comment from 18 Jan 2026 in “Redshift Files: The Hunt for Big Data (2024)” “Bigquery was also one of the biggest wins in my previous role.”
Comment from 20 Feb 2026 in “Almost Every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret after 4 years” “BigQuery, Spanner, Pub/Sub, GKE are all best-in-class.”
Comment from 29 Oct 2026 in “Google Search is now less than half of Alphabet’s revenue” Cheap storage and economical wide events
“dumping everything into BigQuery as a wide event can be the most economical”
Comment from 25 Oct 2026 in “All you need is Wide Events, not "Metrics, Logs and Traces"” “I liken it to the BigQuery cost model, where storage is effectively free.”
Comment from 3 Aug 2026 in “Andy Pavlo Joins ClickHouse to Establish ClickHouse Labs”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Query costs can be high
“I am not going to pay for the query on Google BigQuery to answer it, not after I spent $3k by accident last time”
Comment from 28 Feb 2026 in “Get free Claude max 20x for open-source maintainers” “the cold start + query cost model of serverless warehouses can be painful for API-serving use cases”
Comment from 26 Mar 2026 in “Show HN: DuckDB community extension for prefiltered HNSW using ACORN-1” “requiring stuff such as BigQuery which is expensive”
Comment from 30 Dec 2025 in “Show HN: Hacker Book – All the HN Belong to You 2006 – 2025” Added limits and restrictions over time
“start with an amazing engineering product, and keep continuously degrading the value users get out of a fixed dollar spend”
Comment from 20 May 2026 in “Gemini 3.5 Flash” “before they smothered it with more and more limits and restrictions”
Comment from 12 Apr 2026 in “Pro Max 5x Quota Exhausted in 1.5 Hours Despite Moderate Usage” Jobs failed randomly, causing trouble
“when BigQuery jobs started to fail randomly, causing huge trouble producing critical reports”
Comment from 2 Feb 2026 in “Google Cloud suspended my account for 2 years, only automated replies” “that doesn't make up the disaster that was BigQuery”
Comment from 3 Apr 2026 in “Decisions that eroded trust in Azure – by a former Azure Core engineer” Slow queries and poor point lookups
“after one hour, only about 3% was done”
Comment from 4 Jul 2026 in “Show HN: Hacker-News Buddies” “BigQuery's poor point lookups”
Comment from 19 Apr 2026 in “What Are Skiplists Good For?”
Other cloud data warehouses people recommend
The four most recommended other cloud data warehouses, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Palantir | 86 | 613 | 12% | 12 | — | — |
| Google BigQueryThis page | 26 | 9 | 74% | 10 | — | Approved |
| Snowflake | 26 | 24 | 52% | 12 | — | — |
| Palantir Foundry | 21 | 31 | 40% | 8 | — | — |
| Databricks | 20 | 20 | 50% | 10 | — | — |
What people said
34 of the 36 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“BigQuery, Spanner, Pub/Sub, GKE are all best-in-class.”
“dumping everything into BigQuery as a wide event can be the most economical”
“I prefer BigQuery from GCP because of this reason”
“Handles all the vector stuff natively.”
“scriptable custom dashboards running on top of BigQuery data”
“I liken it to the BigQuery cost model, where storage is effectively free.”
“it's them who pays for it, not you”
“after one hour, only about 3% was done”
“they solved real, hard problems the company was facing for which there were no good external solutions”
“if you know of something better than Bigquery, please let me know”
“start with an amazing engineering product, and keep continuously degrading the value users get out of a fixed dollar spend”
“Makes it easy to get BQ/Clickhouse like performance without running or paying for that infrastructure.”
“BigQuery's poor point lookups”
“before they smothered it with more and more limits and restrictions”
“that doesn't make up the disaster that was BigQuery”
“the cold start + query cost model of serverless warehouses can be painful for API-serving use cases”
“after the switch to and from BigQuery”
“We needed a way to detect ingestion anomalies across 200+ microservices without building a separate ML stack.”
“I am not going to pay for the query on Google BigQuery to answer it, not after I spent $3k by accident last time”
“Easiest way might be to use google cloud's 'bigquery' tool which lets you query hn data with SQL”
“I would prefer grep, bigquery,splunk myself”
“Bigquery was also one of the biggest wins in my previous role.”
“when BigQuery jobs started to fail randomly, causing huge trouble producing critical reports”
“There are other services like S3, BigQuery or SQS that feels like magic.”
“They'll handle all scale, including region replication, backups.”
“You use the cloud provider service provided (BigQuery or AWS Athena for example).”
“For production analytics with concurrent users + strict isolation, Redshift/BQ still win on reliability”
“I move to bigquery when doing true “big data””
“significantly reduces the amount of WITH statements and subqueries needed”
“Google BigQuery gives users SQL power, but it mostly doesn't have embeddings”
“the free tier of BQ lets you query 1TB per month”
“requiring stuff such as BigQuery which is expensive”
“it‘s easy to fell quickly in love with great SaaS services”
“I've been loving using it since they introduced it”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.