Bigtable vs. BigQuery


At a high level, Bigtable is a NoSQL wide-column database. It’s optimized for low latency, large numbers of reads and writes, and maintaining performance at scale. Bigtable use cases are of a certain scale or throughput with strict latency requirements, such as IoT, AdTech, FinTech, and so on. If high throughput and low latency at scale are not priorities for you, then another NoSQL database like Firestore might be a better fit.

On the other hand, BigQuery is an enterprise data warehouse for large amounts of relational structured data. It is optimized for large-scale, ad-hoc SQL-based analysis and reporting, which makes it best suited for gaining organizational insights. You can even use BigQuery to analyze data from Cloud Bigtable.