Druid VS pinot

Apache Druid: Focused on real-time analytics and interactive queries on large datasets. Druid is well-suited for high-performance applications in user-facing analytics, network monitoring, and business intelligence.

Online analytical processing (OLAP) databases like Apache Druid, Apache Pinot, and ClickHouse shine in addressing user-initiated analytical queries. You might write a query to analyze historical data to find the most-clicked products over the past month efficiently using OLAP databases. When contrasting with streaming databases, they may not be optimized for incremental computation, leading to challenges in maintaining the freshness of results. The query in the streaming database focuses on recent data, making it suitable for continuous monitoring. Using streaming databases, you can run queries like finding the top 10 sold products where the “top 10 product list” might change in real-time.

https://github.com/apache/druid

It's always a question of tradeoffs.

The awesome-selfhosted project has a nice list of open-source analytics projects. It's really good inspiration to dig into these projects and find out about the technology choices that other open-source tools in the space have made.

Spencer Kimball (now CEO at CockroachDB) wrote an interesting article on this topic in 2021 where they created spencerkimball/stargazers based on a Python script. So I started thinking: could I create a data pipeline using Nifi and Kafka (two OSS tools often used with Druid) to get the API data into Druid - and then use SQL to do the analytics? The answer was yes! And I have documented the outcome below. Here’s my analytical pipeline for Github stars data using Nifi, Kafka and Druid.

Apache Druid is part of the modern data architecture. It uses a special data format designed for analytical workloads, using extreme parallelisation to get data in and get data out. A shared-nothing, microservices architecture helps you to build highly-available, extreme scale analytics features into your applications.

Apache Druid

But then you realize there are other databases out there focused specifically on analytical use cases with lots of data and complex queries. Newcomers like ClickHouse, Pinot, and Druid (all open source) respond to a new class of problem: The need to develop applications using endpoints published on analytical queries that were previously confined only to the data warehouse and BI tools.

Datadog's product is a bit too close to Apache Druid to have named their design system so similarly.

From https://druid.apache.org/ :

> Druid unlocks new types of queries and workflows for clickstream, APM, supply chain, network telemetry, digital marketing, risk/fraud, and many other types of data. Druid is purpose built for rapid, ad-hoc queries on both real-time and historical data.

Maybe rare for someone to be seeking their first coding job at that age. But plenty of us are in our 50s or older and still coding up a storm. And not necessarily ancient tech or anything. My current project exposes analytics data from Apache Druid and Cassandra via Go microservices hosted in K8s.

Fortunately, it is super easy to build your own leveraging the binary distribution and existing docker.sh.

Apache Pinot: Tailored for providing ultra-low latency analytics at scale. Apache Pinot is widely used for real-time analytical solutions where rapid data insights and decision-making are critical.

Online analytical processing (OLAP) databases like Apache Druid, Apache Pinot, and ClickHouse shine in addressing user-initiated analytical queries. You might write a query to analyze historical data to find the most-clicked products over the past month efficiently using OLAP databases. When contrasting with streaming databases, they may not be optimized for incremental computation, leading to challenges in maintaining the freshness of results. The query in the streaming database focuses on recent data, making it suitable for continuous monitoring. Using streaming databases, you can run queries like finding the top 10 sold products where the “top 10 product list” might change in real-time.

Consume data into third party software (then let Open Search or Apache Spark or Apache Pinot) for analysis/datascience, GIS systems (so you can put reports on a map) or any ticket management system

There is indeed Spark support for writing new data into Pinot (https://docs.pinot.apache.org/basics/data-import/batch-inges...) as well as to query it (https://github.com/apache/pinot/blob/master/pinot-connectors...).

This does not run inside the Pinot cluster - you can use standard Spark execution engine to run this ingestion. In addition, Pinot also supports an out of the box ingestion capability from batch sources using the Minion framework (https://docs.pinot.apache.org/basics/components/cluster/mini...) that does not need any external component (like Spark)

StarTree | Onsite | Mountain View CA, Bangalore India | Site Lead, SRE, Software Engineers (Backend, Data Infrastructure, Platform), Staff Security Engineer Compliance and Governance

You can find all the job postings here: https://startree.ai/careers

My name is Peter Corless and I am the Director of Product Marketing at StarTree (https://startree.ai/). We are a Mountain View, California based company and aer now opening an engineering operation in Bangalore, India.

We make StarTree Cloud, an Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) database-as-a-service (DBaaS) for real-time, user-facing analytics, powered by Apache Pinot.

Apache Pinot (https://pinot.apache.org/) is a top-level Apache Software Foundation (ASF) project that came out of LinkedIn. A lot of the PMCs for the Apache Pinot project work at StarTree. It is also used at Uber, Stripe, DoorDash, Just Eat Takeaway (GrubHub), and a lot of other organizations.

Apache Pinot is known for its ability to provide high concurrency — hundreds of thousands of QPS — against petabytes of data. It uses the star-tree index to provide really fast responses measured in milliseconds.

We're past 100 employees and looking for people who want to help grow us to the next orders of magnitude.

Let me know if you have questions or interest.

But then you realize there are other databases out there focused specifically on analytical use cases with lots of data and complex queries. Newcomers like ClickHouse, Pinot, and Druid (all open source) respond to a new class of problem: The need to develop applications using endpoints published on analytical queries that were previously confined only to the data warehouse and BI tools.

Recently, we have been surveying some streaming database solutions and the primary target is Apache Pinot, which fits our needs from the description and is therefore the primary target.

There are many mainstream streaming databases, and Apache Pinot is the most popular one recently.

Apache Pinot