Amazon Athena vs. Google Cloud SQL

If you are looking to take a lot of the traditional "database administration" work off someone's plate, going with Amazon Athena certainly has "no code" options to optimize lots of database tasks. I would say this option is less appropriate if you have other Microsoft things at play, such as Power BI.

Incentivized

Although Google Cloud SQL has room for improvement by addressing a minor lack of features, its features and services keep it high among other SQL database products. It is very fast compared to others. Since it is cloud-based, maintenance is also easier. Integration capabilities are also more than expected.

Incentivized

• Nested Schemas like JSON data structure
• Ability to adapt the data model to fit your queries better
• Performance Improvement

Incentivized

• Very easy to use and migrate existing database systems to Google Cloud SQL system
• Easy to query with real-time query assessment as well as processing metrics to help optimize the queries
• No need to learn any other querying language (like in Hadoop ecosystem), as SQL works pretty fine
• Easy-to-use GCP portal to type in queries and see the results on the screen (no need to go on command line )
• Easy to set up

Incentivized

• Query manager can incoperate GUI based query designer
• Auto-completion engine sometimes overwrite the query
• Time range selection should be implicit

Incentivized

• Increasing support for more database engines may enable a wider range of application needs to be met.
• Implementing and updating cutting-edge security features on a constant basis.
• Streamlining and enhancing the tools for transferring data to Google Cloud SQL from on-premises databases or other cloud providers.

Everything is great about using Google Cloud SQL, but I only dock marks for requiring the Cloud Auth Proxy to connect locally without using allowed networks. I get that it's necessary since it's behind a VPC but it's just a bit clunky to use. That being said, I wouldn't really call that a big deciding factor for Google Cloud SQL's usability.

Incentivized

GCP support in general requires a support agreement. For small organizations like us, this is not affordable or reasonable. It would help if Google had a support mechanism for smaller organizations. It was a steep learning curve for us because this was our first entry into the cloud database world. Better documentation also would have helped.

Incentivized

Amazon Athena, a product from Amazon, competes with offerings from Google and Microsoft. Overall, I think your database choice depends on some of the other applications you are running at your company. For example, if you are using Microsoft Power BI for reporting needs, you might want to consider going the Azure route.

Incentivized

In our experience, we were down for almost a day, because Database Engineers at Rackspace weren't able to understand or provide a solution, and when they did, they had to recreate the database from the scratch. On a server, this is time consuming. When we faced a similar scenario on Google Cloud SQL it was as easy as to recover from the last image through the console. We were back up in less than 30 minutes. Such a solution, saves you money by reducing churn and keeping the business operating.

Incentivized

• Easy to query terabytes of data with faster response
• Pricing model is also cheap
• No indexing and partitioning

Incentivized

• When first migrated to a cloud environment, the Cloud SQL instance had a higher cost than our former MySQL VM instance, but many other infrastructure costs had also been reduced and the total balance of our migration to the cloud was a reduction of 45% of our infrastructure costs.
• DB performance has increased and maintenance tasks reduced in a high percentage.
• Disaster recovery plans are easier to follow now than before our cloud migration.

Incentivized