The global pandemic continues to impact our world in so many ways. But it has also served as a catalyst for technological change—a forcing function that is accelerating cloud migration. Every company wants to create better products or services, differentiate offerings, price strategically, grab more market share, retain customers, and grow in a sustainable manner.

One of the most effective ways to improve performance and minimize cost in database systems today is by avoiding unnecessary work, such as data reads from the storage layer (e.g., disks, remote storage), transfers over the network, or even data materialization during query execution. Since its early days, Apache Hive improves distributed query execution by pushing down column filter predicates to storage handlers like HBase or columnar data format readers such as Apache ORC.

We are thrilled to announce that Google has been named a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Cloud Data Warehouse, Q1 2021 report. For more than a decade, BigQuery, our petabyte-scale cloud data warehouse, has been in a class of its own. We're excited to share this recognition and we want to thank our strong community of customers and partners for voicing their opinion. We believe this report validates the alignment of our strategy with our customers’ analytics needs.

When a company is small, having a fully centralized data team may not be an issue. As you grow, however, problems can start to arise. You have one structure that’s supporting all of your business units, and they may not be able to dedicate sufficient time and resources to individual business units. This can lead to delays in surfacing important insights and decisions made on old or inaccurate data.