Best Columnar Databases for SAS Studio

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.

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.

Amazon Redshift is a cloud-based data warehouse solution from AWS designed to deliver high-performance analytics and support modern AI-driven workloads. The platform enables organizations to analyze large volumes of structured and unstructured data across data warehouses, data lakes, and third-party sources using SQL. Redshift is built for scalability and cost efficiency, offering improved throughput and price-performance with AWS Graviton-powered RG instances and Redshift Serverless options. The solution also supports near real-time analytics through zero-ETL integrations that connect operational databases, streaming services, and enterprise applications without complex data pipelines. Amazon Redshift integrates with Amazon SageMaker and Amazon Bedrock to support advanced machine learning, analytics, and generative AI use cases.

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.

We created Parquet to make the advantages of compressed, efficient columnar data representation available to any project in the Hadoop ecosystem. Parquet is built from the ground up with complex nested data structures in mind, and uses the record shredding and assembly algorithm described in the Dremel paper. We believe this approach is superior to simple flattening of nested namespaces. Parquet is built to support very efficient compression and encoding schemes. Multiple projects have demonstrated the performance impact of applying the right compression and encoding scheme to the data. Parquet allows compression schemes to be specified on a per-column level, and is future-proofed to allow adding more encodings as they are invented and implemented. Parquet is built to be used by anyone. The Hadoop ecosystem is rich with data processing frameworks, and we are not interested in playing favorites.