First Google created, and wrote papers on, Hadoop and MapReduce, which got reverse-engineered into the current state of the art for Big Data.

But Google has moved on to Dremel, and the rest of the world is slow in catching up.

With BigQuery Google offers a simple-to-user service that doesn’t sacrifice Big Data scale OR speed.

As  Armando Fox, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley who specializes in these sorts of data-center-sized software platforms. put it in a Wired article:

“This is unprecedented. Hadoop is the centerpiece of the “Big Data” movement, a widespread effort to build tools that can analyze extremely large amounts of information. But with today’s Big Data tools, there’s often a drawback. You can’t quite analyze the data with the speed and precision you expect from traditional data analysis or “business intelligence” tools. But with Dremel, Fox says, you can.

“They managed to combine large-scale analytics with the ability to really drill down into the data, and they’ve done it in a way that I wouldn’t have thought was possible,” he says. “The size of the data and the speed with which you can comfortably explore the data is really impressive. People have done Big Data systems before, but before Dremel, no one had really done a system that was that big and that fast.

“Usually, you have to do one or the other. The more you do one, the more you have to give up on the other. But with Dremel, they did both.”