I have used both. My biggest aha moment with BQ was realising it isn’t “sql to query a database”, but “map reduce as a sql”. Redshift really feels like a DB: I’m always worrying about the number of the runtime complexity of my sql, the number of nodes in my fleet, how my joins work, it just feels like a big big DB. BQ is less like that. I’m thinking in terms of memory complexity of my operation : N, log N, etc. Always having as many nodes available as it can be parallelised to. You’re writing a map reduce job on your data, and it’s... it feels like the more appropriate boundary for abstraction.
This is a bit hand wavy, but there is really no better way to get a feel for it than to try it. And think of it less as a db, and more as a map reduce cluster :) if that helps.
This is a bit hand wavy, but there is really no better way to get a feel for it than to try it. And think of it less as a db, and more as a map reduce cluster :) if that helps.