DBMS > DuckDB vs. Google BigQuery vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison DuckDB vs. Google BigQuery vs. Snowflake

Please select another system to include it in the comparison.

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

An embeddable, in-process, column-oriented SQL OLAP RDBMS

Large scale data warehouse service with append-only tables

Cloud-based data warehousing service for structured and semi-structured data

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

DB-Engines Ranking measures the popularity of database management systems
Trend Chart

Score	7.44
Rank	#44	Overall
	#27	Relational DBMS

Score	62.88
Rank	#19	Overall
	#13	Relational DBMS

Score	172.01
Rank	#6	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Website

duckdb.org

cloud.google.com/bigquery

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

duckdb.org/docs

cloud.google.com/bigquery/docs

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Google

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2018

2010

2014

Current release

1.0.0, June 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

MIT License

commercial

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

Providers of DBaaS offerings, please contact us to be listed.

Implementation language

C++

Server operating systems

server-less

hosted

Data scheme

yes

support of semi-structured data formats (JSON, XML, Avro)

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

XML support

Some form of processing data in XML format, e.g. support for XML data structures, and/or support for XPath, XQuery or XSLT.

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

APIs and other access methods

Arrow Database Connectivity (ADBC)
CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

C
C#

3rd party driver
C++
Crystal

3rd party driver
Go

3rd party driver
Java
Lisp

3rd party driver
Python
R
Ruby

3rd party driver
Rust
Swift
Zig

3rd party driver

.Net
Java
JavaScript
Objective-C
PHP
Python
Ruby

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

in JavaScript

user defined functions

Triggers

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

none

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

Support to ensure data integrity after non-atomic manipulations of data

ACID

Since BigQuery is designed for querying data

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes, multi-version concurrency control (MVCC)

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

In-memory capabilities

Is there an option to define some or all structures to be held in-memory only.

yes

User concepts

Access control

Access privileges (owner, writer, reader) on dataset, table or view level

Google Cloud Identity & Access Management (IAM)

Users with fine-grained authorization concept, user roles and pluggable authentication

More information provided by the system vendor

We invite representatives of system vendors to contact us for updating and extending the system information,
and for displaying vendor-provided information such as key customers, competitive advantages and market metrics.

Related products and services

We invite representatives of vendors of related products to contact us for presenting information about their offerings here.

More resources

DB-Engines blog posts

DB-Engines shares Q1 2025 database industry rankings and top climbers: Snowflake and PostgreSQL trending
1 May 2025, DB-Engines

show all

PostgreSQL is the DBMS of the Year 2023
2 January 2024, Matthias Gelbmann, Paul Andlinger

Snowflake is the DBMS of the Year 2022, defending the title from last year
3 January 2023, Matthias Gelbmann, Paul Andlinger

Cloud-based DBMS's popularity grows at high rates
12 December 2019, Paul Andlinger

show all

DB-Engines shares Q1 2025 database industry rankings and top climbers: Snowflake and PostgreSQL trending
1 May 2025, DB-Engines

Snowflake is the Database Management System of the Year 2024
16 January 2025, Tom Russell

Snowflake is the DBMS of the Year 2022, defending the title from last year
3 January 2023, Matthias Gelbmann, Paul Andlinger

show all

Recent citations in the news

Hands-On Exploratory Data Analysis with DuckDB
19 May 2025, Packt

Analyzing JSON Data with DuckDB and SQL
1 May 2025, KDnuggets

Streamlining access to tabular datasets stored in Amazon S3 Tables with DuckDB | Amazon Web Services
18 March 2025, Amazon Web Services (AWS)

DuckDB project releases Local web UI, but not as open source
19 March 2025, devclass

Abusing DuckDB-WASM To Create Doom In SQL
23 April 2025, Hackaday

provided by Google News

Google Cloud partners Coinbase to accept crypto payments
11 October 2022, ledgerinsights.com

Winning the 2020 Google Cloud Technology Partner of the Year – Infrastructure Modernization Award
22 December 2021, cio.com

Hightouch Announces $38 Million in Funding and Launches New Customer 360 Toolkit
19 July 2023, PR Newswire

provided by Google News

Snowflake Named a Leader in IDC MarketScape 2025
15 May 2025, Snowflake

Snowflake Rival Databricks To Buy Database Startup Neon As AI Battle Heats Up
14 May 2025, Investor's Business Daily

The Force Of Data Gravity, With Snowflake
14 May 2025, AdExchanger

Breaking Silos: Integrating Snowflake and Oracle Autonomous Database with Iceberg Tables
22 January 2025, Oracle Blogs

Attentive Unveils Bi-Directional Data Sharing on Snowflake
14 May 2025, CDP Institute

provided by Google News

Share this page