Best Columnar Databases for Salesforce Data Cloud

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.

The Apache Cassandra database is the right choice when you need scalability and high availability without compromising performance. Linear scalability and proven fault-tolerance on commodity hardware or cloud infrastructure make it the perfect platform for mission-critical data. Cassandra's support for replicating across multiple datacenters is best-in-class, providing lower latency for your users and the peace of mind of knowing that you can survive regional outages.

Azure Synapse is Azure SQL Data Warehouse evolved. Azure Synapse is a limitless analytics service that brings together enterprise data warehousing and Big Data analytics. It gives you the freedom to query data on your terms, using either serverless or provisioned resources—at scale. Azure Synapse brings these two worlds together with a unified experience to ingest, prepare, manage, and serve data for immediate BI and machine learning needs.

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.

Greenplum Database® is an advanced, fully featured, open source data warehouse. It provides powerful and rapid analytics on petabyte scale data volumes. Uniquely geared toward big data analytics, Greenplum Database is powered by the world’s most advanced cost-based query optimizer delivering high analytical query performance on large data volumes. Greenplum Database® project is released under the Apache 2 license. We want to thank all our current community contributors and are interested in all new potential contributions. For the Greenplum Database community no contribution is too small, we encourage all types of contributions. An open-source massively parallel data platform for analytics, machine learning and AI. Rapidly create and deploy models for complex applications in cybersecurity, predictive maintenance, risk management, fraud detection, and many other areas. Experience the fully featured, integrated, open source analytics platform.

Use Apache HBase™ when you need random, realtime read/write access to your Big Data. This project's goal is the hosting of very large tables -- billions of rows X millions of columns -- atop clusters of commodity hardware. Automatic failover support between RegionServers. Easy to use Java API for client access. Thrift gateway and a REST-ful Web service that supports XML, Protobuf, and binary data encoding options. Support for exporting metrics via the Hadoop metrics subsystem to files or Ganglia; or via JMX.

MariaDB Platform is a complete enterprise open source database solution. It has the versatility to support transactional, analytical and hybrid workloads as well as relational, JSON and hybrid data models. And it has the scalability to grow from standalone databases and data warehouses to fully distributed SQL for executing millions of transactions per second and performing interactive, ad hoc analytics on billions of rows. MariaDB can be deployed on prem on commodity hardware, is available on all major public clouds and through MariaDB SkySQL as a fully managed cloud database. To learn more, visit mariadb.com.