Understanding how BigQuery works

BigQuery is known for being a serverless, highly scalable, cost-effective cloud data warehouse. The power of this cloud-native service lies in the decoupled storage and compute resources. Unlike other data warehouse software or services, BigQuery service architecture has independent storage and compute infrastructure layers. This allows each layer to scale independently on demand. This decoupled architecture offers high flexibility and cost control for data analytics and data science workloads.

Underneath the user interface, BigQuery is powered by several Google technologies that have been in use since well before the 2011 general availability launch of this service. In this section, we will go over the primary technologies behind BigQuery – Dremel, Colossus, Borg, and Jupiter, so you can better understand how BigQuery is different from other enterprise data warehouse services.

Dremel, the execution engine

Dremel is the service that...