Spatial science teams need a data warehouse that can support the sheer volume of geospatial data they have to process.

There are now a number of Cloud data warehouse options available in the market and this has created a new challenge for organisations; how does a GIS team decide which data warehouse will meet the storage and processing needs of their geospatial data while staying cost-effective?

Two of the major players in this space are Google Cloud’s BigQuery and Snowflake’s data warehouse.

BigQuery is a serverless Cloud data warehouse that is highly scalable, cost-effective and can analyse large and complex datasets and respond within seconds.

Snowflake is a SQL (Structured Query Language) data warehouse built for the Cloud. Snowflake’s unique architecture natively handles diverse data in a single system, with the elasticity to support and scale data, workload and users.
To help make this decision easier for your team, we ran comparative testing on a BigQuery instance and Snowflake’s extra small and large instances to see how they stacked up against each other in:

• Data Loading and Unloading
• Data Consistency
• Programmability and Integration
• Performance and Pricing