Best Columnar Databases

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.

StarTree, powered by Apache Pinot™, is a fully managed real-time analytics platform built for customer-facing applications that demand instant insights on the freshest data. Unlike traditional data warehouses or OLTP databases—optimized for back-office reporting or transactions—StarTree is engineered for real-time OLAP at true scale, meaning: - Data Volume: query performance sustained at petabyte scale - Ingest Rates: millions of events per second, continuously indexed for freshness - Concurrency: thousands to millions of simultaneous users served with sub-second latency With StarTree, businesses deliver always-fresh insights at interactive speed, enabling applications that personalize, monitor, and act in real time.

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.

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.

CelerData is a high-performance SQL engine built to power analytics directly on data lakehouses, eliminating the need for traditional data‐warehouse ingestion pipelines. It delivers sub-second query performance at scale, supports on-the‐fly JOINs without costly denormalization, and simplifies architecture by allowing users to run demanding workloads on open format tables. Built on the open source engine StarRocks, the platform outperforms legacy query engines like Trino, ClickHouse, and Apache Druid in latency, concurrency, and cost-efficiency. With a cloud-managed service that runs in your own VPC, you retain infrastructure control and data ownership while CelerData handles maintenance and optimization. The platform is positioned to power real-time OLAP, business intelligence, and customer-facing analytics use cases and is trusted by enterprise customers (including names such as Pinterest, Coinbase, and Fanatics) who have achieved significant latency reductions and cost savings.

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.

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.

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.