Data Integration for Time-Series: ETL, ELT, and CDC

QuestDB, an open-source time-series database, is designed for high-performance workloads, offering ultra-low latency and high ingestion throughput with a multi-tier storage engine. It supports Parquet and SQL, ensuring data portability and readiness for AI applications without vendor lock-in. As industries undergo digital transformation, the exponential growth of data points necessitates effective data integration strategies to manage diverse data sources and formats. Traditional data integration methods, like ETL, which involve batch processing and complex transformations, struggle with large and varied datasets. In contrast, ELT offers more real-time analysis by loading raw data first and transforming it within the system, though it may require additional steps for complex transformations. Change Data Capture (CDC) provides a solution for real-time data replication by continuously streaming changes from source systems to target systems, such as time-series databases (TSDBs), without significantly altering existing architectures. A reference implementation utilizing QuestDB demonstrates how CDC can integrate seamlessly into existing systems to enable real-time insights for time-series data, maintaining transactional guarantees while adding new components like TSDBs for enhanced analysis.