Best Columnar Databases in the USA

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.

Vertica is an enterprise-grade analytics database platform designed to help organizations run high-performance analytics, data warehousing, and AI workloads across hybrid cloud environments. Following its acquisition by Rocket Software, Vertica now strengthens Rocket’s modernization and enterprise data portfolio by combining advanced analytics, AI capabilities, and trusted mission-critical systems. The platform enables businesses to process and analyze massive volumes of structured and unstructured data while supporting on-premises, cloud, private cloud, and hybrid deployments. Vertica helps enterprises accelerate decision-making, modernize legacy environments, and run advanced analytics and generative AI directly on trusted enterprise data sources. The platform integrates with Rocket DataEdge and Rocket ContentEdge solutions to create a unified data modernization ecosystem focused on governance, analytics, and operational intelligence.

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.

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.

MariaDB Platform is a complete enterprise open source database solution. It has the versatility to support transactional, analytical and hybrid workloads as well as relational, JSON and hybrid data models. And it has the scalability to grow from standalone databases and data warehouses to fully distributed SQL for executing millions of transactions per second and performing interactive, ad hoc analytics on billions of rows. MariaDB can be deployed on prem on commodity hardware, is available on all major public clouds and through MariaDB SkySQL as a fully managed cloud database. To learn more, visit mariadb.com.