[mwhooker]

just started playing around with it. We've been using hive on EMR with tables stored in S3 (json formatted). using a single m1.large to run run queries over an hour of data was taking 10-15 minutes. Bigquery returns the same query in seconds. For example, extracting referrer domains on big query:

  > Query complete (7.6s elapsed, 583 MB processed)

granted that's with an under-provisioned emr "cluster", so I don't want to assign too much meaning to the results, but they are promising.

I'll run some more comparisons on a larger cluster and update later.