Choosing between Snowflake, BigQuery and Redshift
All three are capable. Snowflake separates storage and compute with virtual warehouses and strong data sharing. BigQuery is serverless, priced by scanned data or reserved slots, and sits naturally in Google Cloud. Redshift fits AWS-centred estates and offers serverless and provisioned modes. Lakehouse options built on Databricks or Iceberg suit heavy machine learning use. Data residency and security requirements can also narrow the options.
Decide by where your data and skills already sit, concurrency patterns, governance needs and how costs behave under your query workload. We run small proof-of-value tests with your data before recommending, because price comparisons on paper mislead. Open table formats such as Iceberg and Delta increasingly blur the lines, letting several engines read the same data. We consider them where lock-in matters, but a simple managed warehouse is often the faster, cheaper route for teams without dedicated platform engineers.
