Best Columnar Databases for Cloud

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.

Sadas Engine is the fastest Columnar Database Management System both in Cloud and On Premise. Turn Data into Information with the fastest columnar Database Management System able to perform 100 times faster than transactional DBMSs and able to carry out searches on huge quantities of data over a period even longer than 10 years. Every day we work to ensure impeccable service and appropriate solutions to enhance the activities of your specific business. SADAS srl, a company of the AS Group , is dedicated to the development of Business Intelligence solutions, data analysis applications and DWH tools, relying on cutting-edge technology. The company operates in many sectors: banking, insurance, leasing, commercial, media and telecommunications, and in the public sector. Innovative software solutions for daily management needs and decision-making processes, in any sector

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.

StarTree, powered by Apache Pinot™, is a fully managed real-time analytics platform built for customer-facing applications that demand instant insights on the freshest data. Unlike traditional data warehouses or OLTP databases—optimized for back-office reporting or transactions—StarTree is engineered for real-time OLAP at true scale, meaning: - Data Volume: query performance sustained at petabyte scale - Ingest Rates: millions of events per second, continuously indexed for freshness - Concurrency: thousands to millions of simultaneous users served with sub-second latency With StarTree, businesses deliver always-fresh insights at interactive speed, enabling applications that personalize, monitor, and act in real time.

OpenText Analytics Database is a high-performance, scalable analytics platform that enables organizations to analyze massive data sets quickly and cost-effectively. It supports real-time analytics and in-database machine learning to deliver actionable business insights. The platform can be deployed flexibly across hybrid, multi-cloud, and on-premises environments to optimize infrastructure and reduce total cost of ownership. Its massively parallel processing (MPP) architecture handles complex queries efficiently, regardless of data size. OpenText Analytics Database also features compatibility with data lakehouse architectures, supporting formats like Parquet and ORC. With built-in machine learning and broad language support, it empowers users from SQL experts to Python developers to derive predictive insights.

Apache Druid is an open source distributed data store. Druid’s core design combines ideas from data warehouses, timeseries databases, and search systems to create a high performance real-time analytics database for a broad range of use cases. Druid merges key characteristics of each of the 3 systems into its ingestion layer, storage format, querying layer, and core architecture. Druid stores and compresses each column individually, and only needs to read the ones needed for a particular query, which supports fast scans, rankings, and groupBys. Druid creates inverted indexes for string values for fast search and filter. Out-of-the-box connectors for Apache Kafka, HDFS, AWS S3, stream processors, and more. Druid intelligently partitions data based on time and time-based queries are significantly faster than traditional databases. Scale up or down by just adding or removing servers, and Druid automatically rebalances. Fault-tolerant architecture routes around server failures.

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.