Berlin Buzzwords 2024

Can Apache Pinot replace your OLTP database?
2024-06-10 , Palais Atelier

Apache Pinot is a really fast database that's powering real-time applications across various industries, much akin to how people use OLTP databases. So what's the difference ? Are there scenarios where Pinot can replace an existing OLTP database ? In this talk we will explore this idea.


Apache Pinot is a blazingly fast analytics database that’s powering mission critical applications in Stripe, Doordash, Uber, Cisco, 7-11 and more. It was designed to support very high query throughput (think of 1000s or 100s of 1000s of queries per second) with sub-second query latency. It also supports real time upserts and deletes in real time which makes it an ideal fit for generating accurate insights. This brings us to the question - can you use Apache Pinot in lieu of an OLTP database such as MySQL or Postgres. The answer as you would imagine is - it depends. In this talk we will do a deep dive into what makes Pinot so fast. We’ll take a closer look at what use cases are a good fit for Pinot vs OLTP and also where it complements existing solutions. Finally, we’ll see this all in action with a small demo.

Chinmay Soman is the head of Product at StarTree, building the next generation real time analytics platform for companies of all sizes. Previously he led the streaming platform team at Uber for building a large-scale, self-serve platform around messaging, stream processing and OLAP technologies. Before that, he worked at LinkedIn and IBM, focussing on distributed systems and security. He’s a PMC member of Apache Samza and a committer on Apache Pinot, Voldemort, uReplicator and AthenaX.