Best Columnar Databases
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What are Columnar Databases?
Columnar databases, also known as column-oriented databases or column-store databases, are a type of database that store data in columns instead of rows. Columnar databases have some advantages over traditional row databases including speed and efficiency. Compare and read user reviews of the best Columnar Databases currently available using the table below. This list is updated regularly.
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1
Google Cloud BigQuery
Google
BigQuery is a columnar database that stores data in columns rather than rows, a structure that significantly speeds up analytic queries. This optimized format helps reduce the amount of data scanned, which enhances query performance, especially for large datasets. Columnar storage is particularly useful when running complex analytical queries, as it allows for more efficient processing of specific data columns. New customers can explore BigQuery’s columnar database capabilities with $300 in free credits, testing how the structure can improve their data processing and analytics performance. The columnar format also provides better data compression, further improving storage efficiency and query speed.Starting Price: Free ($300 in free credits) -
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StarTree
StarTree
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. • Gain critical real-time insights to run your business • Seamlessly integrate data streaming and batch data • High performance in throughput and low-latency at petabyte scale • Fully-managed cloud service • Tiered storage to optimize cloud performance & spend • Fully-secure & enterprise-ready -
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Snowflake
Snowflake
Snowflake is a comprehensive AI Data Cloud platform designed to eliminate data silos and simplify data architectures, enabling organizations to get more value from their data. The platform offers interoperable storage that provides near-infinite scale and access to diverse data sources, both inside and outside Snowflake. Its elastic compute engine delivers high performance for any number of users, workloads, and data volumes with seamless scalability. Snowflake’s Cortex AI accelerates enterprise AI by providing secure access to leading large language models (LLMs) and data chat services. The platform’s cloud services automate complex resource management, ensuring reliability and cost efficiency. Trusted by over 11,000 global customers across industries, Snowflake helps businesses collaborate on data, build data applications, and maintain a competitive edge.Starting Price: $2 compute/month -
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Amazon Redshift
Amazon
More customers pick Amazon Redshift than any other cloud data warehouse. Redshift powers analytical workloads for Fortune 500 companies, startups, and everything in between. Companies like Lyft have grown with Redshift from startups to multi-billion dollar enterprises. No other data warehouse makes it as easy to gain new insights from all your data. With Redshift you can query petabytes of structured and semi-structured data across your data warehouse, operational database, and your data lake using standard SQL. Redshift lets you easily save the results of your queries back to your S3 data lake using open formats like Apache Parquet to further analyze from other analytics services like Amazon EMR, Amazon Athena, and Amazon SageMaker. Redshift is the world’s fastest cloud data warehouse and gets faster every year. For performance intensive workloads you can use the new RA3 instances to get up to 3x the performance of any cloud data warehouse.Starting Price: $0.25 per hour -
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Rockset
Rockset
Real-Time Analytics on Raw Data. Live ingest from S3, Kafka, DynamoDB & more. Explore raw data as SQL tables. Build amazing data-driven applications & live dashboards in minutes. Rockset is a serverless search and analytics engine that powers real-time apps and live dashboards. Operate directly on raw data, including JSON, XML, CSV, Parquet, XLSX or PDF. Plug data from real-time streams, data lakes, databases, and data warehouses into Rockset. Ingest real-time data without building pipelines. Rockset continuously syncs new data as it lands in your data sources without the need for a fixed schema. Use familiar SQL, including joins, filters, and aggregations. It’s blazing fast, as Rockset automatically indexes all fields in your data. Serve fast queries that power the apps, microservices, live dashboards, and data science notebooks you build. Scale without worrying about servers, shards, or pagers.Starting Price: Free -
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OpenText Analytics Database is a high-performance, scalable analytics platform that enables organizations to analyze massive data sets quickly and cost-effectively. It supports real-time analytics and in-database machine learning to deliver actionable business insights. The platform can be deployed flexibly across hybrid, multi-cloud, and on-premises environments to optimize infrastructure and reduce total cost of ownership. Its massively parallel processing (MPP) architecture handles complex queries efficiently, regardless of data size. OpenText Analytics Database also features compatibility with data lakehouse architectures, supporting formats like Parquet and ORC. With built-in machine learning and broad language support, it empowers users from SQL experts to Python developers to derive predictive insights.
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7
Querona
YouNeedIT
We make BI & Big Data analytics work easier and faster. Our goal is to empower business users and make always-busy business and heavily loaded BI specialists less dependent on each other when solving data-driven business problems. If you have ever experienced a lack of data you needed, time to consuming report generation or long queue to your BI expert, consider Querona. Querona uses a built-in Big Data engine to handle growing data volumes. Repeatable queries can be cached or calculated in advance. Optimization needs less effort as Querona automatically suggests query improvements. Querona empowers business analysts and data scientists by putting self-service in their hands. They can easily discover and prototype data models, add new data sources, experiment with query optimization and dig in raw data. Less IT is needed. Now users can get live data no matter where it is stored. If databases are too busy to be queried live, Querona will cache the data. -
8
Greenplum
Greenplum Database
Greenplum Database® is an advanced, fully featured, open source data warehouse. It provides powerful and rapid analytics on petabyte scale data volumes. Uniquely geared toward big data analytics, Greenplum Database is powered by the world’s most advanced cost-based query optimizer delivering high analytical query performance on large data volumes. Greenplum Database® project is released under the Apache 2 license. We want to thank all our current community contributors and are interested in all new potential contributions. For the Greenplum Database community no contribution is too small, we encourage all types of contributions. An open-source massively parallel data platform for analytics, machine learning and AI. Rapidly create and deploy models for complex applications in cybersecurity, predictive maintenance, risk management, fraud detection, and many other areas. Experience the fully featured, integrated, open source analytics platform. -
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Apache Druid
Druid
Apache Druid is an open source distributed data store. Druid’s core design combines ideas from data warehouses, timeseries databases, and search systems to create a high performance real-time analytics database for a broad range of use cases. Druid merges key characteristics of each of the 3 systems into its ingestion layer, storage format, querying layer, and core architecture. Druid stores and compresses each column individually, and only needs to read the ones needed for a particular query, which supports fast scans, rankings, and groupBys. Druid creates inverted indexes for string values for fast search and filter. Out-of-the-box connectors for Apache Kafka, HDFS, AWS S3, stream processors, and more. Druid intelligently partitions data based on time and time-based queries are significantly faster than traditional databases. Scale up or down by just adding or removing servers, and Druid automatically rebalances. Fault-tolerant architecture routes around server failures. -
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CrateDB
CrateDB
The enterprise database for time series, documents, and vectors. Store any type of data and combine the simplicity of SQL with the scalability of NoSQL. CrateDB is an open source distributed database running queries in milliseconds, whatever the complexity, volume and velocity of data. -
11
MonetDB
MonetDB
Choose from a wide range of SQL features to realise your applications from pure analytics to hybrid transactional/analytical processing. When you're curious about what's in your data; when you want to work efficiently; when your deadline is closing: MonetDB returns query result in mere seconds or even less. When you want to (re)use your own code; when you need specialised functions: use the hooks to add your own user-defined functions in SQL, Python, R or C/C++. Join us and expand the MonetDB community spread over 130+ countries with students, teachers, researchers, start-ups, small businesses and multinational enterprises. Join the leading Database in Analytical Jobs and surf the innovation! Don’t lose time with complex installation, use MonetDB’s easy setup to get your DBMS up and running quickly. -
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Google Cloud Bigtable
Google
Google Cloud Bigtable is a fully managed, scalable NoSQL database service for large analytical and operational workloads. Fast and performant: Use Cloud Bigtable as the storage engine that grows with you from your first gigabyte to petabyte-scale for low-latency applications as well as high-throughput data processing and analytics. Seamless scaling and replication: Start with a single node per cluster, and seamlessly scale to hundreds of nodes dynamically supporting peak demand. Replication also adds high availability and workload isolation for live serving apps. Simple and integrated: Fully managed service that integrates easily with big data tools like Hadoop, Dataflow, and Dataproc. Plus, support for the open source HBase API standard makes it easy for development teams to get started. -
13
Azure Table Storage
Microsoft
Use Azure Table storage to store petabytes of semi-structured data and keep costs down. Unlike many data stores—on-premises or cloud-based—Table storage lets you scale up without having to manually shard your dataset. Availability also isn’t a concern: using geo-redundant storage, stored data is replicated three times within a region—and an additional three times in another region, hundreds of miles away. Table storage is excellent for flexible datasets—web app user data, address books, device information, and other metadata—and lets you build cloud applications without locking down the data model to particular schemas. Because different rows in the same table can have a different structure—for example, order information in one row, and customer information in another—you can evolve your application and table schema without taking it offline. Table storage embraces a strong consistency model. -
14
Apache Kudu
The Apache Software Foundation
A Kudu cluster stores tables that look just like tables you're used to from relational (SQL) databases. A table can be as simple as a binary key and value, or as complex as a few hundred different strongly-typed attributes. Just like SQL, every table has a primary key made up of one or more columns. This might be a single column like a unique user identifier, or a compound key such as a (host, metric, timestamp) tuple for a machine time-series database. Rows can be efficiently read, updated, or deleted by their primary key. Kudu's simple data model makes it a breeze to port legacy applications or build new ones, no need to worry about how to encode your data into binary blobs or make sense of a huge database full of hard-to-interpret JSON. Tables are self-describing, so you can use standard tools like SQL engines or Spark to analyze your data. Kudu's APIs are designed to be easy to use. -
15
Apache Parquet
The Apache Software Foundation
We created Parquet to make the advantages of compressed, efficient columnar data representation available to any project in the Hadoop ecosystem. Parquet is built from the ground up with complex nested data structures in mind, and uses the record shredding and assembly algorithm described in the Dremel paper. We believe this approach is superior to simple flattening of nested namespaces. Parquet is built to support very efficient compression and encoding schemes. Multiple projects have demonstrated the performance impact of applying the right compression and encoding scheme to the data. Parquet allows compression schemes to be specified on a per-column level, and is future-proofed to allow adding more encodings as they are invented and implemented. Parquet is built to be used by anyone. The Hadoop ecosystem is rich with data processing frameworks, and we are not interested in playing favorites. -
16
Hypertable
Hypertable
Hypertable delivers scalable database capacity at maximum performance to speed up your big data application and reduce your hardware footprint. Hypertable delivers maximum efficiency and superior performance over the competition which translates into major cost savings. A proven scalable design that powers hundreds of Google services. All the benefits of open source with a strong and thriving community. C++ implementation for optimum performance. 24/7/365 support for your business-critical big data application. Unparalleled access to Hypertable brain power by the employer of all core Hypertable developers. Hypertable was designed for the express purpose of solving the scalability problem, a problem that is not handled well by a traditional RDBMS. Hypertable is based on a design developed by Google to meet their scalability requirements and solves the scale problem better than any of the other NoSQL solutions out there. -
17
InfiniDB
Database of Databases
InfiniDB is a column-store DBMS optimized for OLAP workloads. It has a distributed architecture to support Massive Paralllel Processing (MPP). It uses MySQL as its front-end such that users familiar with MySQL can quickly migrate to InfiniDB. Due to this fact, users can connect to InfiniDB using any MySQL connector. InfiniDB applies MVCC to do concurrency control. It uses term System Change Number (SCN) to indicate a version of the system. In its Block Resolution Manager (BRM), it utilizes three structures, version buffer, version substitution structure, and version buffer block manager, to manage multiple versions. InfiniDB applies deadlock detection to resolve conflicts. InfiniDB uses MySQL as its front-end and supports all MySQL syntaxes, including foreign keys. InfiniDB is a columnar DBMS. For each column, InfiniDB applies range partitioning and stores the minimum and maximum value of each partition in a small structure called extent map. -
18
qikkDB
qikkDB
QikkDB is a GPU accelerated columnar database, delivering stellar performance for complex polygon operations and big data analytics. When you count your data in billions and want to see real-time results you need qikkDB. We support Windows and Linux operating systems. We use Google Tests as the testing framework. There are hundreds of unit tests and tens of integration tests in the project. For development on Windows, Microsoft Visual Studio 2019 is recommended, and its dependencies are CUDA version 10.2 minimal, CMake 3.15 or newer, vcpkg, boost. For development on Linux, the dependencies are CUDA version 10.2 minimal, CMake 3.15 or newer, and boost. This project is licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0. You can use an installation script or dockerfile to install qikkDB. -
19
Apache Pinot
Apache Corporation
Pinot is designed to answer OLAP queries with low latency on immutable data. Pluggable indexing technologies - Sorted Index, Bitmap Index, Inverted Index. Joins are currently not supported, but this problem can be overcome by using Trino or PrestoDB for querying. SQL like language that supports selection, aggregation, filtering, group by, order by, distinct queries on data. Consist of of both offline and real-time table. Use real-time table only to cover segments for which offline data may not be available yet. Detect the right anomalies by customizing anomaly detect flow and notification flow. -
20
DataStax
DataStax
The Open, Multi-Cloud Stack for Modern Data Apps. Built on open-source Apache Cassandra™. Global-scale and 100% uptime without vendor lock-in. Deploy on multi-cloud, on-prem, open-source, and Kubernetes. Elastic and pay-as-you-go for improved TCO. Start building faster with Stargate APIs for NoSQL, real-time, reactive, JSON, REST, and GraphQL. Skip the complexity of multiple OSS projects and APIs that don’t scale. Ideal for commerce, mobile, AI/ML, IoT, microservices, social, gaming, and richly interactive applications that must scale-up and scale-down with demand. Get building modern data applications with Astra, a database-as-a-service powered by Apache Cassandra™. Use REST, GraphQL, JSON with your favorite full-stack framework Richly interactive apps that are elastic and viral-ready from Day 1. Pay-as-you-go Apache Cassandra DBaaS that scales effortlessly and affordably. -
21
kdb+
KX Systems
A high-performance cross-platform historical time-series columnar database featuring: - An in-memory compute engine - A real-time streaming processor - An expressive query and programming language called q kdb+ powers kdb Insights portfolio and KDB.AI, together delivering time-oriented data insights and generative AI capabilities to the world’s leading enterprise organizations. Independently benchmarked* as the fastest in-memory, columnar analytics database available, kdb+ delivers unmatched value to businesses operating in the toughest data environments. kdb+ improves decision-making processes to help navigate rapidly changing data landscapes.
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