Best Columnar Databases for SQL

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.

CelerData is a high-performance SQL engine built to power analytics directly on data lakehouses, eliminating the need for traditional data‐warehouse ingestion pipelines. It delivers sub-second query performance at scale, supports on-the‐fly JOINs without costly denormalization, and simplifies architecture by allowing users to run demanding workloads on open format tables. Built on the open source engine StarRocks, the platform outperforms legacy query engines like Trino, ClickHouse, and Apache Druid in latency, concurrency, and cost-efficiency. With a cloud-managed service that runs in your own VPC, you retain infrastructure control and data ownership while CelerData handles maintenance and optimization. The platform is positioned to power real-time OLAP, business intelligence, and customer-facing analytics use cases and is trusted by enterprise customers (including names such as Pinterest, Coinbase, and Fanatics) who have achieved significant latency reductions and cost savings.