what is the difference between BigQuery and Storage on GCP?

Question

Hi guys I am using GCP for the first time and while I walking through the a project's cloud function example with the mock data, I got confused about similarities/differences of each one and I would like more clarity of what makes them different because to me they seem so similar.

Answer 1

BigQuery is a data warehouse and a SQL Engine. You can use it to store tabular data in datasets and tables. In the tables you may as well store more complex structures like arrays and JSONs but not files for example.

Cloud Storage is a blob storage, with functionality similar to what you know in your linux/windows machine (saving files, folders, deleting, copying). Of course that in the backend it's nothing like your local file system.

Answer 2

BigQuery is a fully managed and serverless data warehouse. It's like Snowflake or Redshift.

Google Cloud Storage(GCS) is like Amazon S3 or Azure Storage. Storages are for storing data as the name suggests.

You usually use BigQuery to analyze & query data in order to draw some insights. BigQuery is an analytical engine.

You can store images, videos, logs, files, and etc in GCS(Google Cloud Storage), but BigQuery can't.