Best Columnar Databases for Metabase

BigQuery is a columnar database that stores data in columns rather than rows, a structure that significantly speeds up analytic queries. This optimized format helps reduce the amount of data scanned, which enhances query performance, especially for large datasets. Columnar storage is particularly useful when running complex analytical queries, as it allows for more efficient processing of specific data columns. New customers can explore BigQuery’s columnar database capabilities with $300 in free credits, testing how the structure can improve their data processing and analytics performance. The columnar format also provides better data compression, further improving storage efficiency and query speed.

Snowflake is a comprehensive AI Data Cloud platform designed to eliminate data silos and simplify data architectures, enabling organizations to get more value from their data. The platform offers interoperable storage that provides near-infinite scale and access to diverse data sources, both inside and outside Snowflake. Its elastic compute engine delivers high performance for any number of users, workloads, and data volumes with seamless scalability. Snowflake’s Cortex AI accelerates enterprise AI by providing secure access to leading large language models (LLMs) and data chat services. The platform’s cloud services automate complex resource management, ensuring reliability and cost efficiency. Trusted by over 11,000 global customers across industries, Snowflake helps businesses collaborate on data, build data applications, and maintain a competitive edge.

ClickHouse is a fast open-source OLAP database management system. It is column-oriented and allows to generate analytical reports using SQL queries in real-time. ClickHouse's performance exceeds comparable column-oriented database management systems currently available on the market. It processes hundreds of millions to more than a billion rows and tens of gigabytes of data per single server per second. ClickHouse uses all available hardware to its full potential to process each query as fast as possible. Peak processing performance for a single query stands at more than 2 terabytes per second (after decompression, only used columns). In distributed setup reads are automatically balanced among healthy replicas to avoid increasing latency. ClickHouse supports multi-master asynchronous replication and can be deployed across multiple datacenters. All nodes are equal, which allows avoiding having single points of failure.

More customers pick Amazon Redshift than any other cloud data warehouse. Redshift powers analytical workloads for Fortune 500 companies, startups, and everything in between. Companies like Lyft have grown with Redshift from startups to multi-billion dollar enterprises. No other data warehouse makes it as easy to gain new insights from all your data. With Redshift you can query petabytes of structured and semi-structured data across your data warehouse, operational database, and your data lake using standard SQL. Redshift lets you easily save the results of your queries back to your S3 data lake using open formats like Apache Parquet to further analyze from other analytics services like Amazon EMR, Amazon Athena, and Amazon SageMaker. Redshift is the world’s fastest cloud data warehouse and gets faster every year. For performance intensive workloads you can use the new RA3 instances to get up to 3x the performance of any cloud data warehouse.

OpenText Analytics Database is a high-performance, scalable analytics platform that enables organizations to analyze massive data sets quickly and cost-effectively. It supports real-time analytics and in-database machine learning to deliver actionable business insights. The platform can be deployed flexibly across hybrid, multi-cloud, and on-premises environments to optimize infrastructure and reduce total cost of ownership. Its massively parallel processing (MPP) architecture handles complex queries efficiently, regardless of data size. OpenText Analytics Database also features compatibility with data lakehouse architectures, supporting formats like Parquet and ORC. With built-in machine learning and broad language support, it empowers users from SQL experts to Python developers to derive predictive insights.

Apache Druid is an open source distributed data store. Druid’s core design combines ideas from data warehouses, timeseries databases, and search systems to create a high performance real-time analytics database for a broad range of use cases. Druid merges key characteristics of each of the 3 systems into its ingestion layer, storage format, querying layer, and core architecture. Druid stores and compresses each column individually, and only needs to read the ones needed for a particular query, which supports fast scans, rankings, and groupBys. Druid creates inverted indexes for string values for fast search and filter. Out-of-the-box connectors for Apache Kafka, HDFS, AWS S3, stream processors, and more. Druid intelligently partitions data based on time and time-based queries are significantly faster than traditional databases. Scale up or down by just adding or removing servers, and Druid automatically rebalances. Fault-tolerant architecture routes around server failures.

The enterprise database for time series, documents, and vectors. Store any type of data and combine the simplicity of SQL with the scalability of NoSQL. CrateDB is an open source distributed database running queries in milliseconds, whatever the complexity, volume and velocity of data.