Best Query Engines for Embeddable

BigQuery boasts a powerful query engine that excels at executing large-scale queries on extensive datasets with impressive speed and efficiency. Its serverless design enables organizations to conduct high-performance queries without the hassle of managing servers or infrastructure. The SQL-based query engine is accessible to most data analysts, facilitating a smooth onboarding process for intricate data analysis tasks. New users can take advantage of $300 in complimentary credits to experiment with the query engine, allowing them to perform various queries and evaluate how BigQuery can meet their analytical requirements. Additionally, the platform is engineered for scalability, ensuring that query performance remains reliable as data volumes increase.

Snowflake offers a unified AI Data Cloud platform that transforms how businesses store, analyze, and leverage data by eliminating silos and simplifying architectures. It features interoperable storage that enables seamless access to diverse datasets at massive scale, along with an elastic compute engine that delivers leading performance for a wide range of workloads. Snowflake Cortex AI integrates secure access to cutting-edge large language models and AI services, empowering enterprises to accelerate AI-driven insights. The platform’s cloud services automate and streamline resource management, reducing complexity and cost. Snowflake also offers Snowgrid, which securely connects data and applications across multiple regions and cloud providers for a consistent experience. Their Horizon Catalog provides built-in governance to manage security, privacy, compliance, and access control. Snowflake Marketplace connects users to critical business data and apps to foster collaboration within the AI Data Cloud network. Serving over 11,000 customers worldwide, Snowflake supports industries from healthcare and finance to retail and telecom.

Amazon Athena serves as an interactive query service that simplifies the process of analyzing data stored in Amazon S3 through the use of standard SQL. As a serverless service, it eliminates the need for infrastructure management, allowing users to pay solely for the queries they execute. The user-friendly interface enables you to simply point to your data in Amazon S3, establish the schema, and begin querying with standard SQL commands, with most results returning in mere seconds. Athena negates the requirement for intricate ETL processes to prepare data for analysis, making it accessible for anyone possessing SQL skills to swiftly examine large datasets. Additionally, Athena integrates seamlessly with AWS Glue Data Catalog, which facilitates the creation of a consolidated metadata repository across multiple services. This integration allows users to crawl data sources to identify schemas, update the Catalog with new and modified table and partition definitions, and manage schema versioning effectively. Not only does this streamline data management, but it also enhances the overall efficiency of data analysis within the AWS ecosystem.

ClickHouse is an efficient, open-source OLAP database management system designed for high-speed data processing. Its column-oriented architecture facilitates the creation of analytical reports through real-time SQL queries. In terms of performance, ClickHouse outshines similar column-oriented database systems currently on the market. It has the capability to handle hundreds of millions to over a billion rows, as well as tens of gigabytes of data, on a single server per second. By maximizing the use of available hardware, ClickHouse ensures rapid query execution. The peak processing capacity for individual queries can exceed 2 terabytes per second, considering only the utilized columns after decompression. In a distributed environment, read operations are automatically optimized across available replicas to minimize latency. Additionally, ClickHouse features multi-master asynchronous replication, enabling deployment across various data centers. Each node operates equally, effectively eliminating potential single points of failure and enhancing overall reliability. This robust architecture allows organizations to maintain high availability and performance even under heavy workloads.

StarTree Cloud is a fully-managed real-time analytics platform designed for OLAP at massive speed and scale for user-facing applications. Powered by Apache Pinot, StarTree Cloud provides enterprise-grade reliability and advanced capabilities such as tiered storage, scalable upserts, plus additional indexes and connectors. It integrates seamlessly with transactional databases and event streaming platforms, ingesting data at millions of events per second and indexing it for lightning-fast query responses. StarTree Cloud is available on your favorite public cloud or for private SaaS deployment. StarTree Cloud includes StarTree Data Manager, which allows you to ingest data from both real-time sources such as Amazon Kinesis, Apache Kafka, Apache Pulsar, or Redpanda, as well as batch data sources such as data warehouses like Snowflake, Delta Lake or Google BigQuery, or object stores like Amazon S3, Apache Flink, Apache Hadoop, or Apache Spark. StarTree ThirdEye is an add-on anomaly detection system running on top of StarTree Cloud that observes your business-critical metrics, alerting you and allowing you to perform root-cause analysis — all in real-time.

Trino is a remarkably fast query engine designed to operate at exceptional speeds. It serves as a high-performance, distributed SQL query engine tailored for big data analytics, enabling users to delve into their vast data environments. Constructed for optimal efficiency, Trino excels in low-latency analytics and is extensively utilized by some of the largest enterprises globally to perform queries on exabyte-scale data lakes and enormous data warehouses. It accommodates a variety of scenarios, including interactive ad-hoc analytics, extensive batch queries spanning several hours, and high-throughput applications that require rapid sub-second query responses. Trino adheres to ANSI SQL standards, making it compatible with popular business intelligence tools like R, Tableau, Power BI, and Superset. Moreover, it allows direct querying of data from various sources such as Hadoop, S3, Cassandra, and MySQL, eliminating the need for cumbersome, time-consuming, and error-prone data copying processes. This capability empowers users to access and analyze data from multiple systems seamlessly within a single query. Such versatility makes Trino a powerful asset in today's data-driven landscape.

Presto serves as an open-source distributed SQL query engine designed for executing interactive analytic queries across data sources that can range in size from gigabytes to petabytes. It addresses the challenges faced by data engineers who often navigate multiple query languages and interfaces tied to isolated databases and storage systems. Presto stands out as a quick and dependable solution by offering a unified ANSI SQL interface for comprehensive data analytics and your open lakehouse. Relying on different engines for various workloads often leads to the necessity of re-platforming in the future. However, with Presto, you benefit from a singular, familiar ANSI SQL language and one engine for all your analytic needs, negating the need to transition to another lakehouse engine. Additionally, it efficiently accommodates both interactive and batch workloads, handling small to large datasets and scaling from just a few users to thousands. By providing a straightforward ANSI SQL interface for all your data residing in varied siloed systems, Presto effectively integrates your entire data ecosystem, fostering seamless collaboration and accessibility across platforms. Ultimately, this integration empowers organizations to make more informed decisions based on a comprehensive view of their data landscape.