An open source SQL database designed to process time-series data, faster

What is QuestDB

QuestDB is an open-source database designed to make time-series lightning fast and easy.

It uses a column-oriented approach, vectorized execution, SIMD instructions, and a whole array of low-latency techniques. The whole code base is built from scratch, without dependencies, in the name of performance. We are 100% free from garbage collection.

QuestDB implements SQL, and augments it for time-series. It exposes a Postgres Wire protocol, a high-performance HTTP API, and even supports ingestion with Influx Line Protocol. It supports both relational and time-series joins, which makes it easy to correlate data over time. Writes are durably committed to disk, meaning that the data is safe, yet instantly accessible.

Performance figures

Raw figures

Number operations per second per thread. Writes are durable and writen to disk.

Operation	64-bit double	32-bit int
Read	120 Million /s	240 Million /s
Write	240 Million /s	480M Million /s

On a CPU with 6 memory channels, QuestDB can scan through 117GB of data per second.

Queries

Execution time on a c5.metal instance using 16 of the 96 threads available.

Query	Runtime
`SELECT sum(double) FROM 1bn`	0.061 secs
`SELECT tag, sum(double) FROM 1bn`	0.179 secs
`SELECT tag, sum(double) FROM 1bn WHERE timestamp='2019'`	0.05 secs

Getting Started

The easiest way to get started is with Docker:

docker pull questdb/questdb
docker run -p 9000:9000 -p 8812:8812 questdb/questdb

Alternative methods

Connecting to QuestDB

You can interact with QuestDB using:

Web Console listening on port 9000: localhost:9000
Postgres Wire, for example with PSQL (alpha) on port 8812
HTTP API listening on port 9000

Both the HTTP and PostgreSQL servers reference the database in <root_directory>/db.

You can connect to the Postgres server as follows. The default password is quest

psql -h localhost -p 8812 -U admin -W -d qdb

Building from source

(a) Prerequisites

Java 11 64-bit
Maven 3
Node.js 12 / npm 6

java --version
mvn --version
npm --version

(b) Clone the Repository

git clone [email protected]:questdb/questdb.git

(c) Build the Code

cd questdb
mvn clean package -DskipTests

The build should take around 2 minutes. You can remove -DskipTests to run the 3000+ unit tests. The tests take 3-5 minutes to run.

(d) Run QuestDB

# Create a database root directory and run QuestDB
mkdir <root_directory>
java -p core/target/core-4.3.0-SNAPSHOT.jar -m io.questdb/io.questdb.ServerMain -d <root_directory>