The document discusses the state of SQL-on-Hadoop in the cloud, outlining various PaaS big data services and comparing performance and pricing through extensive benchmarking. It details the evaluation of different platforms, including Amazon EMR, Google Cloud Dataproc, Azure HDInsight, and Rackspace Cloud Big Data using metrics such as execution times and cost efficiency. The findings provide insights into architectural differences and scalability of these services, contributing to future research and development in big data frameworks.