Choosing Between a Streaming Database and a Stream Processing Framework in Python

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on dev.to

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  • redpanda

    Redpanda is a streaming data platform for developers. Kafka API compatible. 10x faster. No ZooKeeper. No JVM!

  • Stream-processing platforms such as Apache Kafka, Apache Pulsar, or Redpanda are specifically engineered to foster event-driven communication in a distributed system and they can be a great choice for developing loosely coupled applications. Stream processing platforms analyze data in motion, offering near-zero latency advantages. For example, consider an alert system for monitoring factory equipment. If a machine's temperature exceeds a certain threshold, a streaming platform can instantly trigger an alert and engineers do timely maintenance.

  • Apache Pulsar

    Apache Pulsar - distributed pub-sub messaging system

  • Stream-processing platforms such as Apache Kafka, Apache Pulsar, or Redpanda are specifically engineered to foster event-driven communication in a distributed system and they can be a great choice for developing loosely coupled applications. Stream processing platforms analyze data in motion, offering near-zero latency advantages. For example, consider an alert system for monitoring factory equipment. If a machine's temperature exceeds a certain threshold, a streaming platform can instantly trigger an alert and engineers do timely maintenance.

  • InfluxDB

    Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

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  • pinot

    Apache Pinot - A realtime distributed OLAP datastore

  • 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.

  • pathway

    Pathway is a high-throughput, low-latency data processing framework that handles live data & streaming for you. Made with ❤️ for Python & ML/AI developers.

  • We understood how streaming databases differ from traditional databases, stream processing engines, conventional analytics databases, or OLAP databases. Now let’s focus on when and why we can use stream data processing frameworks for Python as an alternative to streaming databases. Python is the go-to language for data science and machine learning. There are some stream-processing libraries and frameworks in Python such as Bytewax, Quix, GlassFlow, Pathway. They have been developed to cope with the challenges Python Engineers face with Apache Kafka or Flink since they do not natively support Python.

  • materialize

    The data warehouse for operational workloads. (by MaterializeInc)

  • To fully leverage the data is the new oil concept, companies require a special database designed to manage vast amounts of data instantly. This need has led to different database forms, including NoSQL databases, vector databases, time-series databases, graph databases, in-memory databases, and in-memory data grids. Recent years have seen the rise of cloud-based streaming databases such as RisingWave, Materialize, DeltaStream, and TimePlus. While they each have distinct commercial and technical approaches, their overarching goal remains consistent: to offer users cloud-based streaming database services.

  • ApacheKafka

    A curated re-sources list for awesome Apache Kafka

  • Stream-processing platforms such as Apache Kafka, Apache Pulsar, or Redpanda are specifically engineered to foster event-driven communication in a distributed system and they can be a great choice for developing loosely coupled applications. Stream processing platforms analyze data in motion, offering near-zero latency advantages. For example, consider an alert system for monitoring factory equipment. If a machine's temperature exceeds a certain threshold, a streaming platform can instantly trigger an alert and engineers do timely maintenance.

    Other stream processing engines (such as Flink and Spark Streaming) provide SQL interfaces too, but the key difference is a streaming database has its storage. Stream processing engines require a dedicated database to store input and output data. On the other hand, streaming databases utilize cloud-native storage to maintain materialized views and states, allowing data replication and independent storage scaling.

  • WorkOS

    The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.

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  • Druid

    Apache Druid: a high performance real-time analytics database.

  • 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.

  • debezium

    Change data capture for a variety of databases. Please log issues at https://issues.redhat.com/browse/DBZ.

  • They manage data in the application layer and your original data stays where it is. This way data consistency is no longer an issue as it was with streaming databases. You can use Change Data Capture (CDC) services like Debezium by directly connecting to your primary database, doing computational work, and saving the result back or sending real-time data to output streams.

  • ClickHouse

    ClickHouse® is a free analytics DBMS for big data

  • 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.

NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

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