Apache Pinot (Incubating) - A realtime distributed OLAP datastore

• What is Apache Pinot?
• Features
• When should I use Pinot?
• Building Pinot
• Deploying Pinot to Kubernetes
• Join the Community
• Documentation
• License

What is Apache Pinot?

Apache Pinot is a real-time distributed OLAP datastore, built to deliver scalable real-time analytics with low latency. It can ingest from batch data sources (such as Hadoop HDFS, Amazon S3, Azure ADLS, Google Cloud Storage) as well as stream data sources (such as Apache Kafka).

Pinot was built by engineers at LinkedIn and Uber and is designed to scale up and out with no upper bound. Performance always remains constant based on the size of your cluster and an expected query per second (QPS) threshold.

For getting started guides, deployment recipes, tutorials, and more, please visit our project documentation at https://docs.pinot.apache.org.

Features

Pinot was originally built at LinkedIn to power rich interactive real-time analytic applications such as Who Viewed Profile, Company Analytics, Talent Insights, and many more. UberEats Restaurant Manager is another example of a customer facing Analytics App. At LinkedIn, Pinot powers 50+ user-facing products, ingesting millions of events per second and serving 100k+ queries per second at millisecond latency.

• Column-oriented: a column-oriented database with various compression schemes such as Run Length, Fixed Bit Length.

• Pluggable indexing: pluggable indexing technologies Sorted Index, Bitmap Index, Inverted Index.

• Query optimization: ability to optimize query/execution plan based on query and segment metadata.

• Stream and batch ingest: near real time ingestion from streams and batch ingestion from Hadoop.

• Query with SQL: SQL-like language that supports selection, aggregation, filtering, group by, order by, distinct queries on data.

• Upsert during real-time ingestion: update the data at-scale with consistency

• Multi-valued fields: support for multi-valued fields, allowing you to query fields as comma separated values.

• Cloud-native on Kubernetes: Helm chart provides a horizontally scalable and fault-tolerant clustered deployment that is easy to manage using Kubernetes.

When should I use Pinot?

Pinot is designed to execute real-time OLAP queries with low latency on massive amounts of data and events. In addition to real-time stream ingestion, Pinot also supports batch use cases with the same low latency guarantees. It is suited in contexts where fast analytics, such as aggregations, are needed on immutable data, possibly, with real-time data ingestion. Pinot works very well for querying time series data with lots of dimensions and metrics.

Example query:

SELECT sum(clicks), sum(impressions) FROM AdAnalyticsTable
  WHERE
       ((daysSinceEpoch >= 17849 AND daysSinceEpoch <= 17856)) AND
       accountId IN (123456789)
  GROUP BY
       daysSinceEpoch TOP 100

Pinot is not a replacement for database i.e it cannot be used as source of truth store, cannot mutate data. While Pinot supports text search, it’s not a replacement for a search engine. Also, Pinot queries cannot span across multiple tables by default. You can use the Trino-Pinot Connector or Presto-Pinot Connector to achieve table joins and other features.

Building Pinot

More detailed instructions can be found at Quick Demo section in the documentation.

# Clone a repo
$ git clone https://github.com/apache/pinot.git
$ cd pinot

# Build Pinot
$ mvn clean install -DskipTests -Pbin-dist

# Run the Quick Demo
$ cd pinot-distribution/target/apache-pinot-<version>-SNAPSHOT-bin/apache-pinot-<version>-SNAPSHOT-bin
$ bin/quick-start-batch.sh

Deploying Pinot to Kubernetes

Please refer to Running Pinot on Kubernetes in our project documentation. Pinot also provides Kubernetes integrations with the interactive query engine, Trino Presto, and the data visualization tool, Apache Superset.

Join the Community

• Ask questions on Apache Pinot Slack
• Please join Apache Pinot mailing lists
  dev-subscribe@pinot.apache.org (subscribe to pinot-dev mailing list)
  dev@pinot.apache.org (posting to pinot-dev mailing list)
  users-subscribe@pinot.apache.org (subscribe to pinot-user mailing list)
  users@pinot.apache.org (posting to pinot-user mailing list)
• Apache Pinot Meetup Group: https://www.meetup.com/apache-pinot/

Documentation

Check out Pinot documentation for a complete description of Pinot’s features.

• Quick Demo
• Pinot Architecture
• Pinot Query Language

License

Apache Pinot is under Apache License, Version 2.0