QuestDB

QuestDB's History

QuestDB, formerly known as QuestDB Limited, was founded with a vision to provide an open-source time-series database that balances high throughput ingestion and fast SQL queries with operational simplicity. The company has grown to a team of 25 and operates from London, England, with a fully remote workforce. QuestDB became widely recognized after joining the Y-Combinator S20 batch, which provided a significant boost to its visibility and development capabilities.

QuestDB's Products

QuestDB offers three main products: QuestDB Open Source, QuestDB Cloud, and QuestDB Enterprise. Each product is designed to cater to different needs, from developers seeking robust open-source solutions to enterprises requiring scalable, cloud-based deployments. The products feature high-volume ingest capabilities, out-of-order indexing, deduplication, and native IPv4 type support. These features make QuestDB a versatile choice for various industries, including financial services, space exploration, and e-commerce.

QuestDB's Integration and Compatibility

QuestDB integrates seamlessly with a range of tools like Grafana, Pandas, Spark, Superset, MindsDB, Cube, Redpanda, and Plotly. This broad compatibility ensures that users can easily incorporate QuestDB into their existing workflows. Additionally, it supports PostgreSQL drivers, InfluxDB Line Protocol API, and includes a REST API, making it highly adaptable for diverse use cases. The built-in SQL optimizer and support for time-series joins further enhance its functionality for real-time analytics and monitoring.

QuestDB's Use Cases

QuestDB is applicable across various sectors, from financial market data analysis to connected devices and IoT. Its capabilities for high cardinality data handling, time-based ASOF joins, and window functions for moving averages make it ideal for financial services. In AdTech, it can monitor user activity, ad impressions, clicks, and conversions in real-time. The database also excels in application metrics tracking, enabling real-time visualization of user behavior, API calls, and data latency.

QuestDB's Technical Features

QuestDB offers several advanced technical features, including time-based ASOF joins, Window functions, and 'SAMPLE BY' for creating time buckets. It supports high-volume ingestion at up to 2 million rows per second per node and offers up to 10x faster writes compared to InfluxDB. The database also includes hot and cold read replicas, role-based access control, and supports multiple availability zones. Data compression and columnar storage with time-based partitioning further optimize performance, making it a robust choice for handling large datasets efficiently.