“No one at Google actually used the JDBC drivers, and while we ran full suites of benchmarks every night, those benchmarks didn’t actually reflect the end-to-end performance our users were seeing.”
BigQuery engineers spent years shaving fractions of a second off queries. The outsourced JDBC driver added seconds or minutes on top, and nobody inside Google noticed because nobody used it. In 2019 GigaOm ranked Azure fastest and the market bought Snowflake and BigQuery anyway. Tigani built his company on DuckDB while it was losing benchmarks, so of course he says benchmarks don’t matter.