Why Coinbase and Pinterest Chose StarRocks: Lakehouse-Native Design and Fast Joins at Terabyte Scale

StarRocks is gaining popularity among data engineers for its ability to deliver fast analytics on large-scale data, particularly for customer-facing applications that require sub-second query responses. Companies like Coinbase, Pinterest, and Fresha have adopted StarRocks to overcome the limitations of traditional data warehouses like Snowflake, which can be slow for complex queries. StarRocks distinguishes itself with architectural innovations such as colocated joins, intelligent materialized views, caching mechanisms, and a cost-based optimizer, enabling it to perform fast joins and real-time data analysis without extensive pre-denormalization. This design allows it to execute complex queries efficiently, even on data stored in colder storage like S3, and supports both real-time and batch data ingestion. Despite its strengths, the adoption of StarRocks requires careful data modeling and an understanding of its trade-offs, such as choosing the right partition keys for optimal performance. While it competes with other OLAP databases like ClickHouse and Druid, StarRocks' ability to integrate with data lakes and its support for MySQL compatibility make it a versatile solution for analytics scenarios that involve frequent updates and complex joins.