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Google BigQuery VS Kafka Streams

Compare Google BigQuery VS Kafka Streams and see what are their differences

Google BigQuery logo Google BigQuery

A fully managed data warehouse for large-scale data analytics.

Kafka Streams logo Kafka Streams

Apache Kafka: A Distributed Streaming Platform.
  • Google BigQuery Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-03
  • Kafka Streams Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-11-21

Google BigQuery features and specs

  • Scalability
    BigQuery can effortlessly scale to handle large volumes of data due to its serverless architecture, thereby reducing the operational overhead of managing infrastructure.
  • Speed
    It leverages Google's infrastructure to provide high-speed data processing, making it possible to run complex queries on massive datasets in a matter of seconds.
  • Integrations
    BigQuery easily integrates with various Google Cloud Platform services, as well as other popular data tools like Looker, Tableau, and Power BI.
  • Automatic Optimization
    Features like automatic data partitioning and clustering help to optimize query performance without requiring manual tuning.
  • Security
    BigQuery provides robust security features including IAM roles, customer-managed encryption keys, and detailed audit logging.
  • Cost Efficiency
    The pricing model is based on the amount of data processed, which can be cost-effective for many use cases when compared to traditional data warehouses.
  • Managed Service
    Being fully managed, BigQuery takes care of database administration tasks such as scaling, backups, and patch management, allowing users to focus on their data and queries.

Possible disadvantages of Google BigQuery

  • Cost Predictability
    While the pay-per-use model can be cost-efficient, it can also make cost forecasting difficult. Unexpected large queries could lead to higher-than-anticipated costs.
  • Complexity
    The learning curve can be steep for those who are not already familiar with SQL or Google Cloud Platform, potentially requiring training and education.
  • Limited Updates
    BigQuery is optimized for read-heavy operations, and it can be less efficient for scenarios that require frequent updates or deletions of data.
  • Query Pricing
    Costs are based on the amount of data processed by each query, which may not be suitable for use cases that require frequent analysis of large datasets.
  • Data Transfer Costs
    While internal data movement within Google Cloud can be cost-effective, transferring data to or from other services or on-premises systems can incur additional costs.
  • Dependency on Google Cloud
    Organizations heavily invested in multi-cloud or hybrid-cloud strategies may find the dependency on Google Cloud limiting.
  • Cold Data Performance
    Query performance might be slower for so-called 'cold data,' or data that has not been queried recently, affecting the responsiveness for some workloads.

Kafka Streams features and specs

  • Scalability
    Kafka Streams is designed to scale horizontally, allowing you to handle large volumes of data by distributing processing across multiple nodes.
  • Integration with Kafka
    Kafka Streams is part of the Apache Kafka ecosystem, providing seamless integration with Kafka topics for both input and output, simplifying data pipeline creation.
  • Exactly-once semantics
    Kafka Streams offers exactly-once processing semantics, which ensures data consistency and accuracy in scenarios where data duplication or loss is unacceptable.
  • Microservices Architecture
    It supports microservices architecture by allowing developers to build lightweight stream processing applications that are easy to deploy and manage.
  • Stateful and Stateless Processing
    Supports both stateful (requiring state storage and access) and stateless processing, providing flexibility in stream processing capabilities.
  • Fault Tolerant
    Kafka Streams is designed to be fault-tolerant, automatically recovering from failures and resuming processing without data loss.

Possible disadvantages of Kafka Streams

  • Complexity
    Setting up and configuring Kafka Streams can be complex, requiring a good understanding of Apache Kafka, stream processing principles, and application logic.
  • Resource Intensive
    Kafka Streams can be resource-intensive, demanding sufficient CPU and memory resources, especially when dealing with high-volume data streams.
  • Java Specific
    Primarily designed for Java applications, which may limit its ease of use for teams or projects that are based in other programming languages.
  • Limited UI Tools
    Lacks advanced UI tools for monitoring and managing stream applications, which can make it challenging for users to oversee and troubleshoot applications.
  • Slow Start-up Time
    Kafka Streams applications can have relatively slow start-up times, which might impact scenarios requiring quick deployment and scaling.

Analysis of Google BigQuery

Overall verdict

  • Google BigQuery is a powerful and flexible data warehouse solution that suits a wide range of data analytics needs. Its ability to handle large volumes of data quickly makes it a preferred choice for organizations looking to leverage their data effectively.

Why this product is good

  • Google BigQuery is a fully-managed data warehouse that simplifies the analysis of large datasets. It is known for its scalability, speed, and integration with other Google Cloud services. It supports standard SQL, has built-in machine learning capabilities, and allows for seamless data integration from various sources. The serverless architecture means that users don't need to worry about infrastructure management, and its pay-as-you-go model provides cost efficiency.

Recommended for

  • Businesses requiring fast processing of large datasets
  • Organizations that already utilize Google Cloud services
  • Companies looking for a cost-effective, scalable analytics solution
  • Teams interested in using SQL for data analysis
  • Data scientists integrating machine learning with their data workflows

Google BigQuery videos

Cloud Dataprep Tutorial - Getting Started 101

More videos:

  • Review - Advanced Data Cleanup Techniques using Cloud Dataprep (Cloud Next '19)
  • Demo - Google Cloud Dataprep Premium product demo

Kafka Streams videos

Spark Streaming Vs Kafka Streams || Which is The Best for Stream Processing?

More videos:

  • Review - Big Data Analytics in Near-Real-Time with Apache Kafka Streams - Allen Underwood
  • Review - Spring Tips: Spring Cloud Stream Kafka Streams

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Google BigQuery and Kafka Streams)
Data Dashboard
100 100%
0% 0
Stream Processing
0 0%
100% 100
Big Data
89 89%
11% 11
Data Warehousing
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Google BigQuery and Kafka Streams

Google BigQuery Reviews

Data Warehouse Tools
Google BigQuery: Similar to Snowflake, BigQuery offers a pay-per-use model with separate charges for storage and queries. Storage costs start around $0.01 per GB per month, while on-demand queries are billed at $5 per TB processed.
Source: peliqan.io
Top 6 Cloud Data Warehouses in 2023
You can also use BigQuery’s columnar and ANSI SQL databases to analyze petabytes of data at a fast speed. Its capabilities extend enough to accommodate spatial analysis using SQL and BigQuery GIS. Also, you can quickly create and run machine learning (ML) models on semi or large-scale structured data using simple SQL and BigQuery ML. Also, enjoy a real-time interactive...
Source: geekflare.com
Top 5 Cloud Data Warehouses in 2023
Google BigQuery is an incredible platform for enterprises that want to run complex analytical queries or “heavy” queries that operate using a large set of data. This means it’s not ideal for running queries that are doing simple filtering or aggregation. So if your cloud data warehousing needs lightning-fast performance on a big set of data, Google BigQuery might be a great...
Top 5 BigQuery Alternatives: A Challenge of Complexity
BigQuery's emergence as an attractive analytics and data warehouse platform was a significant win, helping to drive a 45% increase in Google Cloud revenue in the last quarter. The company plans to maintain this momentum by focusing on a multi-cloud future where BigQuery advances the cause of democratized analytics.
Source: blog.panoply.io
16 Top Big Data Analytics Tools You Should Know About
Google BigQuery is a fully-managed, serverless data warehouse that enables scalable analysis over petabytes of data. It is a Platform as a Service that supports querying using ANSI SQL. It also has built-in machine learning capabilities.

Kafka Streams Reviews

We have no reviews of Kafka Streams yet.
Be the first one to post

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Google BigQuery should be more popular than Kafka Streams. It has been mentiond 42 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Google BigQuery mentions (42)

  • Every Database Will Support Iceberg — Here's Why
    This isn’t hypothetical. It’s already happening. Snowflake supports reading and writing Iceberg. Databricks added Iceberg interoperability via Unity Catalog. Redshift and BigQuery are working toward it. - Source: dev.to / about 2 months ago
  • RisingWave Turns Four: Our Journey Beyond Democratizing Stream Processing
    Many of these companies first tried achieving real-time results with batch systems like Snowflake or BigQuery. But they quickly found that even five-minute batch intervals weren't fast enough for today's event-driven needs. They turn to RisingWave for its simplicity, low operational burden, and easy integration with their existing PostgreSQL-based infrastructure. - Source: dev.to / about 2 months ago
  • How to Pitch Your Boss to Adopt Apache Iceberg?
    If your team is managing large volumes of historical data using platforms like Snowflake, Amazon Redshift, or Google BigQuery, you’ve probably noticed a shift happening in the data engineering world. A new generation of data infrastructure is forming — one that prioritizes openness, interoperability, and cost-efficiency. At the center of that shift is Apache Iceberg. - Source: dev.to / 2 months ago
  • Study Notes 2.2.7: Managing Schedules and Backfills with BigQuery in Kestra
    BigQuery Documentation: Google Cloud BigQuery. - Source: dev.to / 4 months ago
  • Docker vs. Kubernetes: Which Is Right for Your DevOps Pipeline?
    Pro Tip: Use Kubernetes operators to extend its functionality for specific cloud services like AWS RDS or GCP BigQuery. - Source: dev.to / 7 months ago
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Kafka Streams mentions (14)

  • Top 10 Common Data Engineers and Scientists Pain Points in 2024
    Data scientists often prefer Python for its simplicity and powerful libraries like Pandas or SciPy. However, many real-time data processing tools are Java-based. Take the example of Kafka, Flink, or Spark streaming. While these tools have their Python API/wrapper libraries, they introduce increased latency, and data scientists need to manage dependencies for both Python and JVM environments. For example,... - Source: dev.to / about 1 year ago
  • Forward Compatible Enum Values in API with Java Jackson
    We’re not discussing the technical details behind the deduplication process. It could be Apache Flink, Apache Spark, or Kafka Streams. Anyway, it’s out of the scope of this article. - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
  • Kafka Internals - Learn kafka in-depth (Part-1)
    In pub-sub systems, you cannot have multiple services to consume the same data because the messages are deleted after being consumed by one consumer. Whereas in Kafka, you can have multiple services to consume. This opens the door to a lot of opportunities such as Kafka streams, Kafka connect. We’ll discuss these at the end of the series. - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
  • Event streaming in .Net with Kafka
    Internally, Streamiz use the .Net client for Apache Kafka released by Confluent and try to provide the same features than Kafka Streams. There is gap between these two library, but the trend is decreasing after each release. - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
  • Apache Pulsar vs Apache Kafka - How to choose a data streaming platform
    Both Kafka and Pulsar provide some kind of stream processing capability, but Kafka is much further along in that regard. Pulsar stream processing relies on the Pulsar Functions interface which is only suited for simple callbacks. On the other hand, Kafka Streams and ksqlDB are more complete solutions that could be considered replacements for Apache Spark or Apache Flink, state-of-the-art stream-processing... - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Google BigQuery and Kafka Streams, you can also consider the following products

Databricks - Databricks provides a Unified Analytics Platform that accelerates innovation by unifying data science, engineering and business.‎What is Apache Spark?

Apache Flink - Flink is a streaming dataflow engine that provides data distribution, communication, and fault tolerance for distributed computations.

Looker - Looker makes it easy for analysts to create and curate custom data experiences—so everyone in the business can explore the data that matters to them, in the context that makes it truly meaningful.

Apache Kafka - Apache Kafka is an open-source message broker project developed by the Apache Software Foundation written in Scala.

Jupyter - Project Jupyter exists to develop open-source software, open-standards, and services for interactive computing across dozens of programming languages. Ready to get started? Try it in your browser Install the Notebook.

Apache Storm - Apache Storm is a free and open source distributed realtime computation system.