If you know the exact dimensions you're going to query, then you can construct a data cube to fit your exact scenario up front, and indeed, those will return fa

If you know the exact dimensions you're going to query, then you can construct a data cube to fit your exact scenario up front, and indeed, those will return fast. BigQuery allows you to explore the data without the pain of setting up your star schemas upfront. Think of it this way: you've got XXX Tb of log data, and you have a new question you want to ask it. At this point, you're heading back to Map-Reduce, or Pig/Hive, etc. BigQuery is based on Google's Dremel (check the paper, great read), and has all the operational + performance learnings from wide deployment at Google. Type in your "SQL like" query and BQ takes care of all the rest.. within an order of seconds. tl;dr: you're comparing apples and oranges.