List of the Top 4 Real-Time Analytic Databases for Apache Flink in 2025

StarTree Cloud functions as a fully-managed platform for real-time analytics, optimized for online analytical processing (OLAP) with exceptional speed and scalability tailored for user-facing applications. Leveraging the capabilities of Apache Pinot, it offers enterprise-level reliability along with advanced features such as tiered storage, scalable upserts, and a variety of additional indexes and connectors. The platform seamlessly integrates with transactional databases and event streaming technologies, enabling the ingestion of millions of events per second while indexing them for rapid query performance. Available on popular public clouds or for private SaaS deployment, StarTree Cloud caters to diverse organizational needs. Included within StarTree Cloud is the StarTree Data Manager, which facilitates the ingestion of data from both real-time sources—such as Amazon Kinesis, Apache Kafka, Apache Pulsar, or Redpanda—and batch data sources like Snowflake, Delta Lake, Google BigQuery, or object storage solutions like Amazon S3, Apache Flink, Apache Hadoop, and Apache Spark. Moreover, the system is enhanced by StarTree ThirdEye, an anomaly detection feature that monitors vital business metrics, sends alerts, and supports real-time root-cause analysis, ensuring that organizations can respond swiftly to any emerging issues. This comprehensive suite of tools not only streamlines data management but also empowers organizations to maintain optimal performance and make informed decisions based on their analytics.

Apache Doris is a sophisticated data warehouse specifically designed for real-time analytics, allowing for remarkably quick access to large-scale real-time datasets. This system supports both push-based micro-batch and pull-based streaming data ingestion, processing information within seconds, while its storage engine facilitates real-time updates, appends, and pre-aggregations. Doris excels in managing high-concurrency and high-throughput queries, leveraging its columnar storage engine, MPP architecture, cost-based query optimizer, and vectorized execution engine for optimal performance. Additionally, it enables federated querying across various data lakes such as Hive, Iceberg, and Hudi, in addition to traditional databases like MySQL and PostgreSQL. The platform also supports intricate data types, including Array, Map, and JSON, and includes a variant data type that allows for the automatic inference of JSON data structures. Moreover, advanced indexing methods like NGram bloomfilter and inverted index are utilized to enhance its text search functionalities. With a distributed architecture, Doris provides linear scalability, incorporates workload isolation, and implements tiered storage for effective resource management. Beyond these features, it is engineered to accommodate both shared-nothing clusters and the separation of storage and compute resources, thereby offering a flexible solution for a wide range of analytical requirements. In conclusion, Apache Doris not only meets the demands of modern data analytics but also adapts to various environments, making it an invaluable asset for businesses striving for data-driven insights.

VeloDB, powered by Apache Doris, is an innovative data warehouse tailored for swift analytics on extensive real-time data streams. It incorporates both push-based micro-batch and pull-based streaming data ingestion processes that occur in just seconds, along with a storage engine that supports real-time upserts, appends, and pre-aggregations, resulting in outstanding performance for serving real-time data and enabling dynamic interactive ad-hoc queries. VeloDB is versatile, handling not only structured data but also semi-structured formats, and it offers capabilities for both real-time analytics and batch processing, catering to diverse data needs. Additionally, it serves as a federated query engine, facilitating easy access to external data lakes and databases while integrating seamlessly with internal data sources. Designed with distribution in mind, the system guarantees linear scalability, allowing users to deploy it either on-premises or as a cloud service, which ensures flexible resource allocation according to workload requirements, whether through the separation or integration of storage and computation components. By capitalizing on the benefits of the open-source Apache Doris, VeloDB is compatible with the MySQL protocol and various functions, simplifying integration with a broad array of data tools and promoting flexibility and compatibility across a multitude of environments. This adaptability makes VeloDB an excellent choice for organizations looking to enhance their data analytics capabilities without compromising on performance or scalability.

Scale from zero to millions of events each second with Arroyo, which is provided as a single, efficient binary. It can be executed locally on MacOS or Linux for development needs and can be seamlessly deployed into production via Docker or Kubernetes. Arroyo offers a groundbreaking approach to stream processing that prioritizes the ease of real-time operations over conventional batch processing methods. Designed from the ground up, Arroyo enables anyone with a basic knowledge of SQL to construct reliable, efficient, and precise streaming pipelines. This capability allows data scientists and engineers to build robust real-time applications, models, and dashboards without requiring a specialized team focused on streaming. Users can easily perform operations such as transformations, filtering, aggregation, and data stream joining merely by writing SQL, achieving results in less than a second. Additionally, your streaming pipelines are insulated from triggering alerts simply due to Kubernetes deciding to reschedule your pods. With its ability to function in modern, elastic cloud environments, Arroyo caters to a range of setups from simple container runtimes like Fargate to large-scale distributed systems managed with Kubernetes. This adaptability makes Arroyo the perfect option for organizations aiming to refine their streaming data workflows, ensuring that they can efficiently handle the complexities of real-time data processing. Moreover, Arroyo’s user-friendly design helps organizations streamline their operations significantly, leading to an overall increase in productivity and innovation.