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Apache Pinot vs Rockset

Compare and contrast Apache Pinot and Rockset by architecture, ingestion, queries, performance, and scalability.

Apache Pinot vs Rockset Architecture

Architecture
Apache Pinot
Rockset
Deployment model
PaaS or self managed
SaaS - infrastructure, software and cluster ops managed by service provider
Use of storage hierarchy
Hot storage plus Deep Store for backup and restore operations
• SSDs store shared hot data, accessible from any Virtual Instance cluster • Cloud storage for durability
Isolation of ingest and query
No
Yes - separate compute clusters (Virtual Instances) for ingest and query
Separation of compute and storage
No, although StarTree separates compute and cloud storage, which is an important consideration for those considering StarTree vs. open-source Pinot
Yes
Isolation for multiple applications
Full isolation with replication
Yes - separate compute cluster (Virtual Instance) for each application

Pinot is a real-time distributed OLAP datastore that ingests both batch and streaming data. It has a distributed systems architecture that scales both horizontally and vertically, but unlike alternative OLAP databases, it does not decouple storage and compute. It supports both self-managed and PaaS options.

Rockset is built to be a cloud-only database and does not have a self-managed option. It disaggregates compute from both hot storage and cloud storage, allowing multiple isolated compute clusters to run on the same shared data.


Apache Pinot vs Rockset Ingestion

Ingestion
Apache Pinot
Rockset
Data sources
Streaming • AWS Kinesis • Apache Kafka Batch • Cloud Storage • PostgreSQL • MySQL • Snowflake • Google BigQuery File upload Write API
Managed data connectors to: • Events streams (e.g. Kafka, Kinesis) • Database CDC (e.g. MongoDB, DynamoDB, MySQL, PostgreSQL) • Data lakes (e.g. S3, Google Cloud Storage)
Semi structured data
Support for JSON column types, but JSON must first be converted to a string
• Ingests JSON and XML without a predefined schema • Ingests nested data
Transformations and rollups
Yes
Yes - using SQL ingest transformations

Pinot supports high-performance ingest from streaming data sources. Each table is either offline or real time. Real-time tables have a smaller retention period and scale based on ingestion rate while offline tables have a larger retention period and scale based on the amount of data. In order to persistently store the generated segments that make up a table, you will need to change controller and server configs to add deep storage.

Rockset has built-in connectors that manage streaming ingestion from common data sources. It has native support for semi-structured data, so that nested JSON and XML can be ingested and queried as is.

Apache Pinot vs Rockset Performance

Performance
Apache Pinot
Rockset
Updates
• By default, all data in Pinot is immutable • Upserts only supported for streaming ingest • No support for upserts on data using the star tree index • No support for upserts on out-of-order events
Documents are mutable and can be updated at the field level
Indexing
• Manually configured • Forward index, inverted Index, Star-Tree index (columnar), bloom filter, range index, search index, JSON index, geospatial index, timestamp index
• Converged Index (row, columnar and inverted index) built on all data by default • All queries are resolved through the index
Query latency
50-1000ms queries on 100s of TB
50-1000ms queries on 100s of TB
Storage format
Pinot stores data in a columnar format and adds additional indexes to perform fast filtering, aggregation and group by
Converged Index, comprising a rowstore, columnstore and inverted index
Streaming ingest
1-2 second ingest for streaming data
• Ingests on a per-record basis • Data latency is typically 1-2 seconds

Like its competitors, Pinot can achieve sub-second query latency at high concurrency. However, this level of performance requires tuning, management, and deep expertise. Compared with the open-source version, the PaaS versions of Pinot address some of these issues, but similarly require expertise while making tradeoffs affecting query performance.

Rockset is designed to make streaming data queryable as quickly as possible by avoiding the need to batch data. It also updates documents efficiently by only reindexing fields that are part of an update request. Rockset indexes all data by default, which results in storage amplification but also enables low-latency queries that require less compute.


Apache Pinot vs Rockset Queries

Queries
Apache Pinot
Rockset
Joins
SQL joins limited to inner join, left-outer, and semi-join
Yes
Query language
SQL
SQL - with extensions for nested data
Developer tooling
• API for querying SQL via POST command • Clients for JDBC, Java, Python, and Golang • Integrations with Trino and Presto
• Data APIs - saved SQL queries executed via REST endpoint • Python, Java, Node.js and Go SDKs • UDFs
Visualization tools
Integrations with Tableau and Superset
Integrations with Tableau, Looker, Grafana, Superset, Power BI, Retoolwhic

In Pinot, SQL-like queries are received by brokers and scatter the request between real-time and offline servers. The two tables then process requests, send results back to the broker, and responds with the result. Joins are limited, as is support for UDFs and subqueries, making Pinot more or less useful depending on the use case.

Rockset supports SQL as its native query language and can perform SQL joins. Users can create data APIs by storing SQL queries in Rockset that are executed from dedicated REST endpoints. Rockset integrates with some common visualization tools, but BI is not Rockset’s primary use case.


Apache Pinot vs Rockset Scalability

Scalability
Apache Pinot
Rockset
Vertical scaling
All 4 pinot node types can be resized manually
Resize compute clusters (Virtual Instances) via API or in the console
Horizontal scaling
• Users can add additional Pinot nodes to scale horizontally • Rebalancing is manual
• Add or remove compute clusters (Virtual Instances) via API or in the console • Scale out compute clusters for higher concurrency • Use separate compute clusters to isolate ingest from query or for multiple isolated applications • No rebalancing required

Pinot allows for vertical scaling by increasing CPU and memory for each node as well as horizontal scaling by adding additional nodes. Capacity planning is a time-consuming, iterative, and manual task. It involves load testing and tuning across multiple vectors including read QPS, write QPS, number of streaming partitions, daily data size, retention period, types of workloads, number and type of segments, and much more.

Rockset Virtual Instances are distributed compute clusters that can be scaled up for faster queries or scaled out for practically unlimited concurrency or if compute isolation is needed. Rockset has shared storage that scales automatically and independently, so no rebalancing is required.