OLAP vs Time-Series Databases: The SQL Perspective

QuestDB is an open-source time-series database designed for high-performance workloads, offering ultra-low latency, high ingestion throughput, and a multi-tier storage engine, with native support for Parquet and SQL to ensure data portability and AI readiness without vendor lock-in. The database landscape has evolved significantly over the past decade, transitioning from expensive OLAP systems reserved for large corporations to more accessible, open-source solutions with SQL as a standard query language. This shift allows businesses to focus on database performance relative to infrastructure costs rather than SQL support. QuestDB, along with databases like TimeScale, DuckDB, and ClickHouse, provides tailored SQL extensions for time-series analytics, facilitating tasks such as retrieving the latest records, filtering by time intervals, joining tables by approximate time, and performing time interval grouping and downsampling with linear interpolation. QuestDB's specific SQL extensions streamline these operations, improving developer productivity and enabling deeper insights, and its optimizations are designed for the unique demands of time-series data, contributing to its leading performance in industry benchmarks.