The Ledger
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Google BigQuery's largest customers never ran 100-terabyte queries, says Jordan Tigani
“The query sizes they were using was a hundred terabytes, and I remembered back from my time at BigQuery you know, we had some of the, Largest customers in the world. We had Walmart, Home Depot, Equifax, HSBC, you know, like, and nobody was using anything, you …”
Distributed data systems impose a massive complexity tax over single-node hardware
“There's just this huge tax that you pay to have to build a distributed system that scales out and can do, like, you know, distributed transactions and shuffling data and, you know, if you were gonna design something for kind of modern hardware, you could make …”
MotherDuck executes queries in milliseconds compared to BigQuery's 400-millisecond overhead
“You know, we can do queries in sort of single digit milliseconds. And you know, in BigQuery, we were very, very happy when we got kind of the overhead down to like, 400 milliseconds.”
Open data formats like Apache Iceberg will pressure incumbent database margins
“I think that's going to be hard for the incumbents, and I think it's going to be a net benefit to the, you know, kind of the people that are coming in with new with new tools and new ways of doing things, and it's going to put pressure on margins which again i…”
Tigani: DuckDB is amazing software, but not a data warehouse
“DuckDB is an amazing, amazing, amazing piece of software, but it's not a data warehouse.”
Network latency makes 60 FPS data visualization impossible in traditional cloud architectures
“This is how you get the 60 frame per second kinds of you know, visual, visual visualization speeds that are literally impossible in more traditional architecture, because if the, if like, if I'm talking to a data center that is, you know, on the other side of …”
Modern laptops are 10 to 100 times faster than MapReduce-era servers
“But you know, nowadays, like, you know, I've got a Mac M two laptop. It's two years old. It's like probably an order of magnitude to two orders of magnitude faster than the server machines were back when, you know, MapReduce came out and people started buildin…”
MotherDuck gave DuckDB's creators a co-founder-sized equity stake at inception
“We also gave them a chunk of the company when we started, like essentially a co-founder share.”
DuckDB's co-creator agreed not to assist any MotherDuck competitors
“On the other hand, he did agree not to work with anybody who's doing something similar to what we're doing.”
Tigani: DuckDB ported to Apple Silicon in just two hours
“When the Mac Silicon came out, it took them, like, two hours to make it work on the new Mac Silicon versus, like, having to, sort of, do all this, like, complex hand, hand coding hand coding stuff.”
Ex-Google engineers must realize marketing is war because nobody cares naturally
“I realized that marketing is war. You know, when you're at Google, you think, oh, well, you don't need to do marketing. Who needs to do marketing? But then you realize outside of Google is like, well, nobody cares about what you're doing. And you have to basic…”
Google BigQuery lacked time zone support for years due to engineering difficulty
“In BigQuery, we didn't implement time zones for, I think, like six or seven years, because it's just really hard to get right, and like, you know, there's all kinds of bizarro things in in, when you deal with you know, with time zones, and we're like, well, we…”