Best Query Engines for Unity Catalog

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.

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.

PuppyGraph allows you to effortlessly query one or multiple data sources through a cohesive graph model. Traditional graph databases can be costly, require extensive setup time, and necessitate a specialized team to maintain. They often take hours to execute multi-hop queries and encounter difficulties when managing datasets larger than 100GB. Having a separate graph database can complicate your overall architecture due to fragile ETL processes, ultimately leading to increased total cost of ownership (TCO). With PuppyGraph, you can connect to any data source, regardless of its location, enabling cross-cloud and cross-region graph analytics without the need for intricate ETLs or data duplication. By directly linking to your data warehouses and lakes, PuppyGraph allows you to query your data as a graph without the burden of constructing and maintaining lengthy ETL pipelines typical of conventional graph database configurations. There's no longer a need to deal with delays in data access or unreliable ETL operations. Additionally, PuppyGraph resolves scalability challenges associated with graphs by decoupling computation from storage, allowing for more efficient data handling. This innovative approach not only enhances performance but also simplifies your data management strategy.

Regardless of whether your project involves a single table or numerous tables, StarRocks guarantees an impressive performance improvement of at least 300% when compared to other widely used solutions. With its comprehensive array of connectors, you can seamlessly ingest streaming data and capture information in real time, ensuring that you always have access to the latest insights. The query engine is tailored to suit your specific use cases, allowing for adaptable analytics without the need to relocate data or modify SQL queries. This provides an effortless way to scale your analytics capabilities as required. StarRocks not only facilitates a swift transition from data to actionable insights, but also stands out with its unmatched performance, offering a holistic OLAP solution that addresses the most prevalent data analytics requirements. Its advanced memory-and-disk-based caching framework is purpose-built to reduce I/O overhead associated with retrieving data from external storage, significantly enhancing query performance while maintaining efficiency. This unique combination of features ensures that users can maximize their data's potential without unnecessary delays.

Starburst empowers organizations to enhance their decision-making capabilities by providing rapid access to all their data without the hassle of transferring or duplicating it. As companies accumulate vast amounts of data, their analysis teams often find themselves waiting for access to perform their evaluations. By facilitating direct access to data at its source, Starburst ensures that teams can quickly and accurately analyze larger datasets without the need for data movement. Starburst Enterprise offers a robust, enterprise-grade version of the open-source Trino (formerly known as Presto® SQL), which is fully supported and tested for production use. This solution not only boosts performance and security but also simplifies the deployment, connection, and management of a Trino environment. By enabling connections to any data source—be it on-premises, in the cloud, or within a hybrid cloud setup—Starburst allows teams to utilize their preferred analytics tools while seamlessly accessing data stored in various locations. This innovative approach significantly reduces the time taken for insights, helping businesses stay competitive in a data-driven world.

The Databricks Data Intelligence Platform empowers every member of your organization to leverage data and artificial intelligence effectively. Constructed on a lakehouse architecture, it establishes a cohesive and transparent foundation for all aspects of data management and governance, enhanced by a Data Intelligence Engine that recognizes the distinct characteristics of your data. Companies that excel across various sectors will be those that harness the power of data and AI. Covering everything from ETL processes to data warehousing and generative AI, Databricks facilitates the streamlining and acceleration of your data and AI objectives. By merging generative AI with the integrative advantages of a lakehouse, Databricks fuels a Data Intelligence Engine that comprehends the specific semantics of your data. This functionality enables the platform to optimize performance automatically and manage infrastructure in a manner tailored to your organization's needs. Additionally, the Data Intelligence Engine is designed to grasp the unique language of your enterprise, making the search and exploration of new data as straightforward as posing a question to a colleague, thus fostering collaboration and efficiency. Ultimately, this innovative approach transforms the way organizations interact with their data, driving better decision-making and insights.

Apache Spark™ serves as a comprehensive analytics platform designed for large-scale data processing. It delivers exceptional performance for both batch and streaming data by employing an advanced Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) scheduler, a sophisticated query optimizer, and a robust execution engine. With over 80 high-level operators available, Spark simplifies the development of parallel applications. Additionally, it supports interactive use through various shells including Scala, Python, R, and SQL. Spark supports a rich ecosystem of libraries such as SQL and DataFrames, MLlib for machine learning, GraphX, and Spark Streaming, allowing for seamless integration within a single application. It is compatible with various environments, including Hadoop, Apache Mesos, Kubernetes, and standalone setups, as well as cloud deployments. Furthermore, Spark can connect to a multitude of data sources, enabling access to data stored in systems like HDFS, Alluxio, Apache Cassandra, Apache HBase, and Apache Hive, among many others. This versatility makes Spark an invaluable tool for organizations looking to harness the power of large-scale data analytics.

Handling and storing tabular data, such as that found in CSV or Parquet formats, is essential for data management. Transferring large result sets to clients is a common requirement, especially in extensive client/server frameworks designed for centralized enterprise data warehousing. Additionally, writing to a single database from various simultaneous processes poses its own set of challenges. DuckDB serves as a relational database management system (RDBMS), which is a specialized system for overseeing data organized into relations. In this context, a relation refers to a table, characterized by a named collection of rows. Each row within a table maintains a consistent structure of named columns, with each column designated to hold a specific data type. Furthermore, tables are organized within schemas, and a complete database comprises a collection of these schemas, providing structured access to the stored data. This organization not only enhances data integrity but also facilitates efficient querying and reporting across diverse datasets.

LlamaIndex serves as a versatile "data framework" designed to assist in the development of applications powered by large language models (LLMs). It enables the integration of semi-structured data from various APIs, including Slack, Salesforce, and Notion. This straightforward yet adaptable framework facilitates the connection of custom data sources to LLMs, enhancing the capabilities of your applications with essential data tools. By linking your existing data formats—such as APIs, PDFs, documents, and SQL databases—you can effectively utilize them within your LLM applications. Furthermore, you can store and index your data for various applications, ensuring seamless integration with downstream vector storage and database services. LlamaIndex also offers a query interface that allows users to input any prompt related to their data, yielding responses that are enriched with knowledge. It allows for the connection of unstructured data sources, including documents, raw text files, PDFs, videos, and images, while also making it simple to incorporate structured data from sources like Excel or SQL. Additionally, LlamaIndex provides methods for organizing your data through indices and graphs, making it more accessible for use with LLMs, thereby enhancing the overall user experience and expanding the potential applications.