Google BigQuery is similar to Amazon Redshift, in that it is also a large-scale data warehouse system that is fully cloud-based. However, while Redshift requires separate provisioning (of an AWS cluster and Redshift resources), Google BigQuery is the plug-and-play equivalent of the same. To use BigQuery, the user simply needs to create an account at https://bigquery.cloud.google.com and begin running queries after loading their datasets.

The charging method of BigQuery is also quite different in comparison to Redshift. Users can query a cumulative of 1 terabyte of data at no charge per month. BigQuery uses a pay-per-use model whereby queries have allocated costs. In essence, BigQuery abstracts the complexity of setting up a database and allows the end user to dedicate time to writing queries and/or performing analytics without the overhead of setting up an infrastructure. Scaling queries, allocating resources, and tasks that may have otherwise required manual intervention (by a DBA for example), hence become redundant.

Google also has a set of other NoSQL products on its cloud platform, including Google Cloud Datastore, a NoSQL document-based database; Google BigTable; Google Spanner; and several others. The following figure shows the Google BigQuery database: