Why BigQuery can’t match ClickHouse Cloud for real-time analytics

Summary

ClickHouse Cloud delivered 438× better end-to-end performance per dollar than BigQuery under Capacity pricing, and 512× under On-demand pricing, while continuously ingesting 113.2 billion stock-market quotes. The CostBench methodology measures preparation cost, query cost, and query runtime as data arrives. ClickHouse Cloud led in all three components: preparation cost was 8.5× lower than BigQuery Capacity, normalized query cost was 94× lower, and accumulated query runtime was 50.8× lower. The difference originates in how each system handles incoming data: ClickHouse orders raw data and builds current summaries during inserts, while BigQuery makes new rows queryable before background clustering and materialized view refresh complete. This leaves BigQuery aggregate queries to include rows that refresh has not yet summarized, increasing cost and runtime.

Takeaways

1. 1

   ClickHouse Cloud achieved 438× better end-to-end performance per dollar than BigQuery Capacity and 512× better than BigQuery On-demand in the CostBench real-time analytics benchmark.

2. 2

   ClickHouse orders raw data and builds current summaries during inserts, while BigQuery makes new rows queryable before background clustering and MV refresh complete, increasing query cost and runtime.

3. 3

   The CostBench methodology combines preparation cost, normalized query cost, and accumulated query runtime into a single end-to-end performance-per-dollar score.

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