I also work in databases. The thing is the database engine isn't usually slow by itself. It's the programmers whose programs usually are just as lame as they ar

I also work in databases. The thing is the database engine isn't usually slow by itself. It's the programmers whose programs usually are just as lame as they are. For example during one of my "help us with the slow database server" consultancy assignments I discovered an incident of a query executed collectively over a 1000 times per second on average, adding considerable load to an already overloaded RDBMS, querying a single-row table where the company data (name and address) was stored, which has not changed for over 10 years. No caching in the app whatsoever. The clients _had to_ ask for this info afresh every so often. Eliminating this and only a few similar patterns reduced overall CPU consumption by some 50% and sped up the damn system a lot. I could write a book about this kind of bs I see every day. So, comparing BigQuery to some small data warehouse product, while BigQuery could not even get off the ground yet, that I call bs and put in the same drawer as the above. If the intention was to say "product x" vs "product y", this is what should have been done. But the author deliberately put the proper product names in a lame and dishonest perspective, which makes the whole thing not credible.