Best Real-Time Analytic Databases for Apache Kafka

SingleStore, previously known as MemSQL, is a highly scalable and distributed SQL database that can operate in any environment. It is designed to provide exceptional performance for both transactional and analytical tasks while utilizing well-known relational models. This database supports continuous data ingestion, enabling operational analytics critical for frontline business activities. With the capacity to handle millions of events each second, SingleStore ensures ACID transactions and allows for the simultaneous analysis of vast amounts of data across various formats, including relational SQL, JSON, geospatial, and full-text search. It excels in data ingestion performance at scale and incorporates built-in batch loading alongside real-time data pipelines. Leveraging ANSI SQL, SingleStore offers rapid query responses for both current and historical data, facilitating ad hoc analysis through business intelligence tools. Additionally, it empowers users to execute machine learning algorithms for immediate scoring and conduct geoanalytic queries in real-time, thereby enhancing decision-making processes. Furthermore, its versatility makes it a strong choice for organizations looking to derive insights from diverse data types efficiently.

InfluxDB is a purpose-built data platform designed to handle all time series data, from users, sensors, applications and infrastructure — seamlessly collecting, storing, visualizing, and turning insight into action. With a library of more than 250 open source Telegraf plugins, importing and monitoring data from any system is easy. InfluxDB empowers developers to build transformative IoT, monitoring and analytics services and applications. InfluxDB’s flexible architecture fits any implementation — whether in the cloud, at the edge or on-premises — and its versatility, accessibility and supporting tools (client libraries, APIs, etc.) make it easy for developers at any level to quickly build applications and services with time series data. Optimized for developer efficiency and productivity, the InfluxDB platform gives builders time to focus on the features and functionalities that give their internal projects value and their applications a competitive edge. To get started, InfluxData offers free training through InfluxDB University.

StarTree Cloud is a fully-managed real-time analytics platform designed for OLAP at massive speed and scale for user-facing applications. Powered by Apache Pinot, StarTree Cloud provides enterprise-grade reliability and advanced capabilities such as tiered storage, scalable upserts, plus additional indexes and connectors. It integrates seamlessly with transactional databases and event streaming platforms, ingesting data at millions of events per second and indexing it for lightning-fast query responses. StarTree Cloud is available on your favorite public cloud or for private SaaS deployment. StarTree Cloud includes StarTree Data Manager, which allows you to ingest data from both real-time sources such as Amazon Kinesis, Apache Kafka, Apache Pulsar, or Redpanda, as well as batch data sources such as data warehouses like Snowflake, Delta Lake or Google BigQuery, or object stores like Amazon S3, Apache Flink, Apache Hadoop, or Apache Spark. StarTree ThirdEye is an add-on anomaly detection system running on top of StarTree Cloud that observes your business-critical metrics, alerting you and allowing you to perform root-cause analysis — all in real-time.

Materialize is an innovative reactive database designed to provide updates to views incrementally. It empowers developers to seamlessly work with streaming data through the use of standard SQL. One of the key advantages of Materialize is its ability to connect directly to a variety of external data sources without the need for pre-processing. Users can link to real-time streaming sources such as Kafka, Postgres databases, and change data capture (CDC), as well as access historical data from files or S3. The platform enables users to execute queries, perform joins, and transform various data sources using standard SQL, presenting the outcomes as incrementally-updated Materialized views. As new data is ingested, queries remain active and are continuously refreshed, allowing developers to create data visualizations or real-time applications with ease. Moreover, constructing applications that utilize streaming data becomes a straightforward task, often requiring just a few lines of SQL code, which significantly enhances productivity. With Materialize, developers can focus on building innovative solutions rather than getting bogged down in complex data management tasks.

Optimize your time and reduce expenses by simplifying data pipelines using hassle-free open source solutions. Covering everything from data ingestion to visualization, all components are seamlessly integrated, fully managed, and exceptionally reliable, ensuring your engineering team enjoys working with data. You can opt for any of DoubleCloud’s managed open source services or take advantage of the entire platform's capabilities, which include data storage, orchestration, ELT, and instantaneous visualization. We offer premier open source services such as ClickHouse, Kafka, and Airflow, deployable on platforms like Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud. Our no-code ELT tool enables real-time data synchronization between various systems, providing a fast, serverless solution that integrates effortlessly with your existing setup. With our managed open-source data visualization tools, you can easily create real-time visual representations of your data through interactive charts and dashboards. Ultimately, our platform is crafted to enhance the daily operations of engineers, making their tasks more efficient and enjoyable. This focus on convenience is what sets us apart in the industry.

Regardless of whether your project involves a single table or numerous tables, StarRocks guarantees an impressive performance improvement of at least 300% when compared to other widely used solutions. With its comprehensive array of connectors, you can seamlessly ingest streaming data and capture information in real time, ensuring that you always have access to the latest insights. The query engine is tailored to suit your specific use cases, allowing for adaptable analytics without the need to relocate data or modify SQL queries. This provides an effortless way to scale your analytics capabilities as required. StarRocks not only facilitates a swift transition from data to actionable insights, but also stands out with its unmatched performance, offering a holistic OLAP solution that addresses the most prevalent data analytics requirements. Its advanced memory-and-disk-based caching framework is purpose-built to reduce I/O overhead associated with retrieving data from external storage, significantly enhancing query performance while maintaining efficiency. This unique combination of features ensures that users can maximize their data's potential without unnecessary delays.

Timeplus is an efficient, user-friendly stream processing platform that is both powerful and affordable. It comes packaged as a single binary, making it easy to deploy in various environments. Designed for data teams across diverse sectors, it enables the quick and intuitive processing of both streaming and historical data. With a lightweight design that requires no external dependencies, Timeplus offers comprehensive analytic capabilities for streaming and historical data. Its cost is just a fraction—1/10—of what similar open-source frameworks charge. Users can transform real-time market and transaction data into actionable insights seamlessly. The platform supports both append-only and key-value streams, making it ideal for monitoring financial information. Additionally, Timeplus allows the creation of real-time feature pipelines effortlessly. It serves as a unified solution for managing all infrastructure logs, metrics, and traces, which are essential for maintaining observability. Timeplus also accommodates a broad array of data sources through its user-friendly web console UI, while providing options to push data via REST API or to create external streams without the need to copy data into the platform. Overall, Timeplus offers a versatile and comprehensive approach to data processing for organizations looking to enhance their operational efficiency.

Tiger Data reimagines PostgreSQL for the modern era — powering everything from IoT and fintech to AI and Web3. As the creator of TimescaleDB, it brings native time-series, event, and analytical capabilities to the world’s most trusted database engine. Through Tiger Cloud, developers gain access to a fully managed, elastic infrastructure with auto-scaling, high availability, and point-in-time recovery. The platform introduces core innovations like Forks (copy-on-write storage branches for CI/CD and testing), Memory (durable agent context and recall), and Search (hybrid BM25 and vector retrieval). Combined with hypertables, continuous aggregates, and materialized views, Tiger delivers the speed of specialized analytical systems without sacrificing SQL simplicity. Teams use Tiger Data to unify real-time and historical analytics, build AI-driven workflows, and streamline data management at scale. It integrates seamlessly with the entire PostgreSQL ecosystem, supporting APIs, CLIs, and modern development frameworks. With over 20,000 GitHub stars and a thriving developer community, Tiger Data stands as the evolution of PostgreSQL for the intelligent data age.

Aerospike is the global leader for next-generation, real time NoSQL data solutions at any scale. Aerospike helps enterprises overcome seemingly impossible data bottlenecks and compete with other companies at a fraction of the cost and complexity of legacy NoSQL databases. Aerospike's Hybrid Memory Architecture™ is a patented technology that unlocks the full potential of modern hardware and delivers previously unimaginable value. It does this by delivering unimaginable value from huge amounts of data at both the edge, core, and in the cloud. Aerospike empowers customers with the ability to instantly combat fraud, dramatically increase shopping cart sizes, deploy global digital payment networks, and provide instant, one-to-1 personalization for millions. Aerospike customers include Airtel and Banca d'Italia as well as Snap, Verizon Media, Wayfair, PayPal, Snap, Verizon Media, and Nielsen. The company's headquarters is in Mountain View, California. Additional locations are in London, Bengaluru, India, and Tel Aviv in Israel.

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.

The Databricks Data Intelligence Platform empowers every member of your organization to leverage data and artificial intelligence effectively. Constructed on a lakehouse architecture, it establishes a cohesive and transparent foundation for all aspects of data management and governance, enhanced by a Data Intelligence Engine that recognizes the distinct characteristics of your data. Companies that excel across various sectors will be those that harness the power of data and AI. Covering everything from ETL processes to data warehousing and generative AI, Databricks facilitates the streamlining and acceleration of your data and AI objectives. By merging generative AI with the integrative advantages of a lakehouse, Databricks fuels a Data Intelligence Engine that comprehends the specific semantics of your data. This functionality enables the platform to optimize performance automatically and manage infrastructure in a manner tailored to your organization's needs. Additionally, the Data Intelligence Engine is designed to grasp the unique language of your enterprise, making the search and exploration of new data as straightforward as posing a question to a colleague, thus fostering collaboration and efficiency. Ultimately, this innovative approach transforms the way organizations interact with their data, driving better decision-making and insights.

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.

VeloDB, which utilizes Apache Doris, represents a cutting-edge data warehouse designed for rapid analytics on large-scale real-time data. It features both push-based micro-batch and pull-based streaming data ingestion that occurs in mere seconds, alongside a storage engine capable of real-time upserts, appends, and pre-aggregations. The platform delivers exceptional performance for real-time data serving and allows for dynamic interactive ad-hoc queries. VeloDB accommodates not only structured data but also semi-structured formats, supporting both real-time analytics and batch processing capabilities. Moreover, it functions as a federated query engine, enabling seamless access to external data lakes and databases in addition to internal data. The system is designed for distribution, ensuring linear scalability. Users can deploy it on-premises or as a cloud service, allowing for adaptable resource allocation based on workload demands, whether through separation or integration of storage and compute resources. Leveraging the strengths of open-source Apache Doris, VeloDB supports the MySQL protocol and various functions, allowing for straightforward integration with a wide range of data tools, ensuring flexibility and compatibility across different environments.

Scale from zero to millions of events per second effortlessly. Arroyo is delivered as a single, compact binary, allowing for local development on MacOS or Linux, and seamless deployment to production environments using Docker or Kubernetes. As a pioneering stream processing engine, Arroyo has been specifically designed to simplify real-time processing, making it more accessible than traditional batch processing. Its architecture empowers anyone with SQL knowledge to create dependable, efficient, and accurate streaming pipelines. Data scientists and engineers can independently develop comprehensive real-time applications, models, and dashboards without needing a specialized team of streaming professionals. By employing SQL, users can transform, filter, aggregate, and join data streams, all while achieving sub-second response times. Your streaming pipelines should remain stable and not trigger alerts simply because Kubernetes has chosen to reschedule your pods. Built for modern, elastic cloud infrastructures, Arroyo supports everything from straightforward container runtimes like Fargate to complex, distributed setups on Kubernetes, ensuring versatility and robust performance across various environments. This innovative approach to stream processing significantly enhances the ability to manage data flows in real-time applications.