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 and 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 REST API, and even supports ingestion with InfluxDB 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.

Live demo

Query our demo dataset with 1.6 billion rows in milliseconds.

Web Console

Interactive console to import data (drag and drop) and start querying right away. Check our Web Console guide to get started:

Web Console guide

Performance figures

Raw figures

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

Operation	64-bit double	32-bit int
Read	120 Million /s	240 Million /s
Write	240 Million /s	480 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 run -p 9000:9000 -p 8812:8812 questdb/questdb

You can more information about Docker usage here.

Alternative methods

• Start with Homebrew
• Start with the binaries

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
• REST 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
node --version

(b) Clone the Repository

git clone git@github.com: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/questdb-5.0.3-SNAPSHOT.jar -m io.questdb/io.questdb.ServerMain -d <root_directory>

Resources

Complete references are available in the Documentation. There are also several guides to get started.

Quick-start guides:

• Docker
• Homebrew
• Using the binaries

Usage guides:

• Web Console
• Postgres wire with PSQL (alpha)
• REST API
• CRUD operations

Concepts:

• SQL extensions
• Storage model
• Partitions
• Designated timestamp

Support / Contact

Slack Channel

Roadmap

Our roadmap is here

Contribution

Feel free to contribute to the project by forking the repository and submitting pull requests. Please make sure you have read our contributing guide.

Contributors ✨

Thanks to these wonderful people (emoji key):

clickingbuttons 💻 🤔 📓	ideoma 💻 📓 ⚠️	tonytamwk 💻 📓	sirinath 🤔	igor-suhorukov 💻 🤔	mick2004 💻 📦	rawkode 💻 🚇
solidnerd 💻 🚇	solanav 💻 📖	shantanoo-desai 📝 💡

This project follows the all-contributors specification. Contributions of any kind welcome!