Key takeaways:
– Real-time analytics databases serve challenging analytics workloads on a massive scale.
– A Gigaom Sonar report examines this emerging market with companies like Aerospike, ClickHouse, StarRocks, and more.
– The leading companies in the report scored an average of 2.6 stars (out of three) on essential elements for real-time analytics databases.
– Consumers should prioritize their current and future needs when selecting solutions and vendor roadmaps.
Organizations requiring databases for powerful analytics should check out the most recent Gigaom Sonar report. The report delves into real-time analytics databases—a product line that has only come to prominence over the last few years.
Understanding Real-Time Analytics Databases
These databases serve analytics tasks that are demanding. Existing tech capabilities such as OLAP and data streaming integrate in new ways to address unique data processing hurdles on an enormous scale. Andrew Brust, Gigaom’s longtime research director, authored this report on the new, expanding market and its prominent players. These include Aerospike, SingleStore, StarRocks, and more.
Brust highlights that real-time analytics databases aren’t a significant technological departure— more of an evolution from what already existed. Such databases have links to traditional online analytical processing (OLAP) databases but go beyond those by being capable of connecting to and ingesting massive amounts of data, often from batch sources, change data capture (CDC) sources, and streaming data sources.
The Evolution of Real-Time Analytics Databases
To expedite analytics over substantial data quantities with minimum latency, this category uses structural and architectural adjustments. Such optimizations include columnar orientation, different indexing types, pre-aggregation of queries, and vector processing. Scalability, a system’s resilience under increasing workloads, and high availability are critical due to the analysis’s time-sensitive nature.
Notably, some of the most challenging and largest big data workloads today run on real-time analytics databases. Examples include the hundreds of millions of daily auctions by ad-tech firm Sovrn and Cisco ThousandEyes processing 1.5 billion events daily. The most intricate real-time analytics use cases involve consumer-facing web applications. This is due to the unique combination of data freshness, data scale, query latency, and query throughput that billions of users bring.
Rating the Field’s Major Players
In the Gigaom Sonar report, Brust rated the nine contenders across seven categories he considered crucial for real-time analytics databases. These categories included storage analytics optimization, data ingestion, analytics preprocessing, schema management, client tool connectivity, scalability, and high availability.
The outcome saw a five-way tie for the top position among ClickHouse, StarRocks, and others. Each scored an average of 2.6 stars (out of three) based on these traits.
In his report, Brust highlights that every vendor discussed qualifies as an innovator. They are all builders of data platforms, not simply feature providers. Hence every product provided a well-rounded, comprehensive offering.
However, he also stressed that there were no ‘universal’ best or worst offerings. Customers should ponder their current and future needs when comparing solutions and vendor roadmaps.
StarTree’s CEO and co-founder, Kishore Gopalakrishna, praised the findings of the report. He expressed delight at the recognition, reinforcing StarTree’s relentless commitment towards innovation and providing top-notch solutions to enable their customers to fully harness their data’s potential.
In conclusion, the Gigaom Sonar report serves an integral tool for organizations in the market for powerful, large-scale analytics databases. By navigating the nuances of real-time analytics databases, businesses can make informed decisions that align with their present and forecasted needs.
