List of the Top 8 OLAP Databases for Unity Catalog in 2025

BigQuery is specifically designed for Online Analytical Processing (OLAP), enabling rapid data querying and analysis on complex, multidimensional datasets. This platform empowers organizations to execute intricate analytical queries on extensive datasets, facilitating thorough analysis across multiple business facets. With its automatic scaling capability, BigQuery efficiently manages even the most demanding OLAP workloads. New users can benefit from $300 in complimentary credits to experience firsthand how BigQuery can optimize OLAP functions, enhancing both the speed and precision of their business intelligence efforts. Additionally, its serverless design allows organizations to concentrate on their data without the burden of infrastructure management.

Snowflake is a comprehensive, cloud-based data platform designed to simplify data management, storage, and analytics for businesses of all sizes. With a unique architecture that separates storage and compute resources, Snowflake offers users the ability to scale both independently based on workload demands. The platform supports real-time analytics, data sharing, and integration with a wide range of third-party tools, allowing businesses to gain actionable insights from their data quickly. Snowflake's advanced security features, including automatic encryption and multi-cloud capabilities, ensure that data is both protected and easily accessible. Snowflake is ideal for companies seeking to modernize their data architecture, enabling seamless collaboration across departments and improving decision-making processes.

Azure Synapse is the evolution of Azure SQL Data Warehouse, offering a robust analytics platform that merges enterprise data warehousing with Big Data capabilities. It allows users to query data flexibly, utilizing either serverless or provisioned resources on a grand scale. By fusing these two areas, Azure Synapse creates a unified experience for ingesting, preparing, managing, and delivering data, addressing both immediate business intelligence needs and machine learning applications. This cutting-edge service improves accessibility to data while simplifying the analytics workflow for businesses. Furthermore, it empowers organizations to make data-driven decisions more efficiently than ever before.

Amazon Redshift stands out as the favored option for cloud data warehousing among a wide spectrum of clients, outpacing its rivals. It caters to analytical needs for a variety of enterprises, ranging from established Fortune 500 companies to burgeoning startups, helping them grow into multi-billion dollar entities, as exemplified by Lyft. The platform is particularly adept at facilitating the extraction of meaningful insights from vast datasets. Users can effortlessly perform queries on large amounts of both structured and semi-structured data throughout their data warehouses, operational databases, and data lakes, utilizing standard SQL for their queries. Moreover, Redshift enables the convenient storage of query results back to an S3 data lake in open formats like Apache Parquet, allowing for further exploration with other analysis tools such as Amazon EMR, Amazon Athena, and Amazon SageMaker. Acknowledged as the fastest cloud data warehouse in the world, Redshift consistently improves its speed and performance annually. For high-demand workloads, the newest RA3 instances can provide performance levels that are up to three times superior to any other cloud data warehouse on the market today. This impressive capability establishes Redshift as an essential tool for organizations looking to optimize their data processing and analytical strategies, driving them toward greater operational efficiency and insight generation. As more businesses recognize these advantages, Redshift’s user base continues to expand rapidly.

Trino is an exceptionally swift query engine engineered for remarkable performance. This high-efficiency, distributed SQL query engine is specifically designed for big data analytics, allowing users to explore their extensive data landscapes. Built for peak efficiency, Trino shines in low-latency analytics and is widely adopted by some of the biggest companies worldwide to execute queries on exabyte-scale data lakes and massive data warehouses. It supports various use cases, such as interactive ad-hoc analytics, long-running batch queries that can extend for hours, and high-throughput applications that demand quick sub-second query responses. Complying with ANSI SQL standards, Trino is compatible with well-known business intelligence tools like R, Tableau, Power BI, and Superset. Additionally, it enables users to query data directly from diverse sources, including Hadoop, S3, Cassandra, and MySQL, thereby removing the burdensome, slow, and error-prone processes related to data copying. This feature allows users to efficiently access and analyze data from different systems within a single query. Consequently, Trino's flexibility and power position it as an invaluable tool in the current data-driven era, driving innovation and efficiency across industries.

No matter if your project consists of a single table or multiple tables, StarRocks promises a remarkable performance boost of no less than 300% when stacked against other commonly used solutions. Its extensive range of connectors allows for the smooth ingestion of streaming data, capturing information in real-time and guaranteeing that you have the most current insights at your fingertips. Designed specifically for your unique use cases, the query engine enables flexible analytics without the hassle of moving data or altering SQL queries, which simplifies the scaling of your analytics capabilities as needed. Moreover, StarRocks not only accelerates the journey from data to actionable insights but also excels with its unparalleled performance, providing a comprehensive OLAP solution that meets the most common data analytics demands. Its sophisticated caching system, leveraging both memory and disk, is specifically engineered to minimize the I/O overhead linked with data retrieval from external storage, which leads to significant enhancements in query performance while ensuring overall efficiency. Furthermore, this distinctive combination of features empowers users to fully harness the potential of their data, all while avoiding unnecessary delays in their analytic processes. Ultimately, StarRocks represents a pivotal tool for those seeking to optimize their data analysis and operational productivity.

The Databricks Data Intelligence Platform empowers every individual within your organization to effectively utilize data and artificial intelligence. Built on a lakehouse architecture, it creates a unified and transparent foundation for comprehensive data management and governance, further enhanced by a Data Intelligence Engine that identifies the unique attributes of your data. Organizations that thrive across various industries will be those that effectively harness the potential of data and AI. Spanning a wide range of functions from ETL processes to data warehousing and generative AI, Databricks simplifies and accelerates the achievement of your data and AI aspirations. By integrating generative AI with the synergistic benefits of a lakehouse, Databricks energizes a Data Intelligence Engine that understands the specific semantics of your data. This capability allows the platform to automatically optimize performance and manage infrastructure in a way that is customized to the requirements of your organization. Moreover, the Data Intelligence Engine is designed to recognize the unique terminology of your business, making the search and exploration of new data as easy as asking a question to a peer, thereby enhancing collaboration and efficiency. This progressive approach not only reshapes how organizations engage with their data but also cultivates a culture of informed decision-making and deeper insights, ultimately leading to sustained competitive advantages.

Managing and storing tabular data, like that in CSV or Parquet formats, is crucial for effective data management practices. It's often necessary to transfer large sets of results to clients, particularly in expansive client-server architectures tailored for centralized enterprise data warehousing solutions. The task of writing to a single database while accommodating multiple concurrent processes also introduces various challenges that need to be addressed. DuckDB functions as a relational database management system (RDBMS), designed specifically to manage data structured in relational formats. In this setup, a relation is understood as a table, which is defined by a named collection of rows. Each row within a table is organized with a consistent set of named columns, where each column is assigned a particular data type to ensure uniformity. Moreover, tables are systematically categorized within schemas, and an entire database consists of a series of these schemas, allowing for structured interaction with the stored data. This organized framework not only bolsters the integrity of the data but also streamlines the process of querying and reporting across various datasets, ultimately improving data accessibility for users and applications alike.