Best Columnar Databases for OpenMetadata

BigQuery is a database designed to organize information in columns instead of rows, a configuration that greatly accelerates analytical queries. This streamlined layout minimizes the volume of data that needs to be scanned, resulting in enhanced query performance, particularly when dealing with substantial datasets. The columnar format is especially advantageous for executing intricate analytical queries, as it enables more effective handling of individual data columns. New users can take advantage of BigQuery’s columnar database features by utilizing $300 in free credits, allowing them to experiment with how this structure can optimize their data processing and analytics efficiency. Additionally, the columnar storage format offers improved data compression, leading to better storage utilization and quicker query execution.

Snowflake offers a unified AI Data Cloud platform that transforms how businesses store, analyze, and leverage data by eliminating silos and simplifying architectures. It features interoperable storage that enables seamless access to diverse datasets at massive scale, along with an elastic compute engine that delivers leading performance for a wide range of workloads. Snowflake Cortex AI integrates secure access to cutting-edge large language models and AI services, empowering enterprises to accelerate AI-driven insights. The platform’s cloud services automate and streamline resource management, reducing complexity and cost. Snowflake also offers Snowgrid, which securely connects data and applications across multiple regions and cloud providers for a consistent experience. Their Horizon Catalog provides built-in governance to manage security, privacy, compliance, and access control. Snowflake Marketplace connects users to critical business data and apps to foster collaboration within the AI Data Cloud network. Serving over 11,000 customers worldwide, Snowflake supports industries from healthcare and finance to retail and telecom.

When seeking a database that ensures both scalability and high availability without sacrificing performance, Apache Cassandra stands out as an ideal option. Its linear scalability paired with proven fault tolerance on standard hardware or cloud services positions it as an excellent choice for handling mission-critical data effectively. Additionally, Cassandra's superior capability to replicate data across several datacenters not only enhances user experience by reducing latency but also offers reassurance in the event of regional failures. This combination of features makes it a robust solution for organizations that prioritize data resilience and efficiency.

ClickHouse is an efficient, open-source OLAP database management system designed for high-speed data processing. Its column-oriented architecture facilitates the creation of analytical reports through real-time SQL queries. In terms of performance, ClickHouse outshines similar column-oriented database systems currently on the market. It has the capability to handle hundreds of millions to over a billion rows, as well as tens of gigabytes of data, on a single server per second. By maximizing the use of available hardware, ClickHouse ensures rapid query execution. The peak processing capacity for individual queries can exceed 2 terabytes per second, considering only the utilized columns after decompression. In a distributed environment, read operations are automatically optimized across available replicas to minimize latency. Additionally, ClickHouse features multi-master asynchronous replication, enabling deployment across various data centers. Each node operates equally, effectively eliminating potential single points of failure and enhancing overall reliability. This robust architecture allows organizations to maintain high availability and performance even under heavy workloads.

Amazon Redshift is the preferred choice among customers for cloud data warehousing, outpacing all competitors in popularity. It supports analytical tasks for a diverse range of organizations, from Fortune 500 companies to emerging startups, facilitating their evolution into large-scale enterprises, as evidenced by Lyft's growth. No other data warehouse simplifies the process of extracting insights from extensive datasets as effectively as Redshift. Users can perform queries on vast amounts of structured and semi-structured data across their operational databases, data lakes, and the data warehouse using standard SQL queries. Moreover, Redshift allows for the seamless saving of query results back to S3 data lakes in open formats like Apache Parquet, enabling further analysis through various analytics services, including Amazon EMR, Amazon Athena, and Amazon SageMaker. Recognized as the fastest cloud data warehouse globally, Redshift continues to enhance its performance year after year. For workloads that demand high performance, the new RA3 instances provide up to three times the performance compared to any other cloud data warehouse available today, ensuring businesses can operate at peak efficiency. This combination of speed and user-friendly features makes Redshift a compelling choice for organizations of all sizes.

OpenText Analytics Database is a cutting-edge analytics platform designed to accelerate decision-making and operational efficiency through fast, real-time data processing and advanced machine learning. Organizations benefit from its flexible deployment options, including on-premises, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments, enabling them to tailor analytics infrastructure to their specific needs and lower overall costs. The platform’s massively parallel processing (MPP) architecture delivers lightning-fast query performance across large, complex datasets. It supports columnar storage and data lakehouse compatibility, allowing seamless analysis of data stored in various formats such as Parquet, ORC, and AVRO. Users can interact with data using familiar languages like SQL, R, Python, Java, and C/C++, making it accessible for both technical and business users. In-database machine learning capabilities allow for building and deploying predictive models without moving data, providing real-time insights. Additional analytics functions include time series, geospatial, and event-pattern matching, enabling deep and diverse data exploration. OpenText Analytics Database is ideal for organizations looking to harness AI and analytics to drive smarter business decisions.

Greenplum Database® stands out as a sophisticated, comprehensive, and open-source data warehouse solution. It excels in providing swift and robust analytics on data volumes that reach petabyte scales. Designed specifically for big data analytics, Greenplum Database is driven by a highly advanced cost-based query optimizer that ensures exceptional performance for analytical queries on extensive data sets. This project operates under the Apache 2 license, and we extend our gratitude to all current contributors while inviting new ones to join our efforts. In the Greenplum Database community, every contribution is valued, regardless of its size, and we actively encourage diverse forms of involvement. This platform serves as an open-source, massively parallel data environment tailored for analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence applications. Users can swiftly develop and implement models aimed at tackling complex challenges in fields such as cybersecurity, predictive maintenance, risk management, and fraud detection, among others. Dive into the experience of a fully integrated, feature-rich open-source analytics platform that empowers innovation.

Apache Druid is a distributed data storage solution that is open source. Its fundamental architecture merges concepts from data warehouses, time series databases, and search technologies to deliver a high-performance analytics database capable of handling a diverse array of applications. By integrating the essential features from these three types of systems, Druid optimizes its ingestion process, storage method, querying capabilities, and overall structure. Each column is stored and compressed separately, allowing the system to access only the relevant columns for a specific query, which enhances speed for scans, rankings, and groupings. Additionally, Druid constructs inverted indexes for string data to facilitate rapid searching and filtering. It also includes pre-built connectors for various platforms such as Apache Kafka, HDFS, and AWS S3, as well as stream processors and others. The system adeptly partitions data over time, making queries based on time significantly quicker than those in conventional databases. Users can easily scale resources by simply adding or removing servers, and Druid will manage the rebalancing automatically. Furthermore, its fault-tolerant design ensures resilience by effectively navigating around any server malfunctions that may occur. This combination of features makes Druid a robust choice for organizations seeking efficient and reliable real-time data analytics solutions.

Pinot is built to efficiently handle OLAP queries on static data with minimal latency. It incorporates various pluggable indexing methods, including Sorted Index, Bitmap Index, and Inverted Index. While it currently lacks support for joins, this limitation can be mitigated by utilizing Trino or PrestoDB for querying purposes. The system offers an SQL-like language that enables selection, aggregation, filtering, grouping, ordering, and distinct queries on datasets. It comprises both offline and real-time tables, with real-time tables being utilized to address segments lacking offline data. Additionally, users can tailor the anomaly detection process and notification mechanisms to accurately identify anomalies. This flexibility ensures that users can maintain data integrity and respond proactively to potential issues.

MariaDB Platform is an enterprise-level open-source database solution. It supports transactional, analytical, and hybrid workloads, as well as relational and JSON data models. It can scale from standalone databases to data warehouses to fully distributed SQL, which can execute millions of transactions per second and perform interactive, ad-hoc analytics on billions upon billions of rows. MariaDB can be deployed on prem-on commodity hardware. It is also available on all major public cloud providers and MariaDB SkySQL, a fully managed cloud database. MariaDB.com provides more information.