Google's BigQuery Vs. Hadoop: a Matchup

Nerval's Lobster writes "Ready to 'Analyze terabytes of data with just a click of a button?' That's the claim Google makes with its BigQuery platform. But is BigQuery really an analytics superstar? It was unveiled in Beta back in 2010, but recently gained some improvements such as the ability to do large joins. In the following piece, Jeff Cogswell compares BigQuery to some other analytics and OLAP tools, and hopefully that'll give some additional context to anyone who's thinking of using BigQuery or a similar platform for data. His conclusion? In the end, BigQuery is just another database. It can handle massive amounts of data, but so can Hadoop. It's not free, but neither is Hadoop once you factor in the cost of the hardware, support, and the paychecks of the people running it. The public version of BigQuery probably isn't even used by Google, which likely has something bigger and better that we'll see in five years or so."