[xhrpost]

I don't think it's always that easy. I work on some large databases (1TB+) where even queries utilizing indexed columns still take prohibitively long to run. Sure we could look into partitioning (and we likely might) but then more work is progressively falling on engineering to keep the system running for the standards of analysts but not necessarily the product.

BigQuery in these cases has been very useful. Everything I throw at it returns in seconds. I can also do more text comparison queries that on a standard RDBMS would have required a full text index (which would probably be huge). But with BigQuery even those queries take seconds and I don't have to take production resources to view it.

[ericd]

Sounds like you need a better index :-)

If you need fulltext search, I've enjoyed using Sphinx and Lucene in the past. Is the column you want to do fulltext on 1 TB? 1 TB of RAM in 128 gig DIMMs is <$10k these days, so might as well get at least that much if you're running anything like the bills these guys are talking about.