quasardb
activeby QuasarDB SAS · since 2009 · also known as Quasar, QuasarDB, qdb
Distributed columnar time-series database, now sold as Quasar, for tick, sensor and industrial data.
Overview
quasardb is a C++ distributed, column-oriented database with native time-series tables, built by the French company QuasarDB SAS (the GitHub organisation is still named bureau14) and now marketed simply as Quasar. It ingests high-rate timestamped data into sharded tables, compresses it aggressively and answers SQL-like queries with time-series extensions such as ASOF joins, LAG/LEAD and pre-aggregated tables, while also supporting key-value lookups. Its sweet spot is capital-markets tick data, industrial telemetry and other workloads where years of history and fresh data must be queried together. It is commercial software deployed in your own AWS, Azure or Google Cloud account, on-premises, at the edge or as an appliance, with official Python, Java, Go, .NET, C and REST clients; 3.14 is the current release line.
Strengths & trade-offs
Strengths
- +Columnar time-series tables with heavy compression keep years of tick or sensor data affordable
- +ASOF joins, LAG/LEAD and aggregated tables built for market and telemetry analysis
- +Same engine runs in your own cloud account, on-premises or at the edge
- +Well-maintained Python API that fits pandas and NumPy workflows
- +Integrations with Kafka, Spark, Grafana, Tableau, Excel and ODBC tools
Trade-offs
- −Commercial and sales-led; pricing and editions are not published
- −Smaller community and ecosystem than kdb+, QuestDB or TimescaleDB
- −Custom SQL dialect rather than PostgreSQL compatibility
Great for
- +Capital-markets tick and order-book history
- +Industrial and IoT sensor telemetry
- +Backtesting and quantitative research over long histories
- +Edge collection with central analytics
Think twice for
- −General OLTP applications
- −Teams needing a permissive open-source engine
- −Small hobby projects
Capabilities
Native or official first-party support · 7 of 25 tracked
Scale & consistency
- Comfortable data size
- Large · ≤ 1 PB
- Horizontal scaling
- Native
- Multi-region
- No
- Transactions
- Full ACID
- Consistency
- Strong
- Schema
- Strict
- Architecture
- Distributed, Client server
- Query languages
- SQL-like query language with time-series extensions
Data is sharded across cluster nodes; hosting cost is dominated by object storage for long histories.
Deployment
available on · AWS · Azure · Google Cloud
Ecosystem
Alternatives to quasardb
Column-store time-series engine with the q language, a fixture of capital-markets tick data.
quasardb vs kdb-plus →Columnar time-series SQL database built for market data and very high ingest rates.
quasardb vs questdb →PostgreSQL extension adding hypertables, columnar compression and continuous aggregates for time series.
quasardb vs timescaledb →Open-source columnar OLAP database known for very fast aggregations over billions of rows.
quasardb vs clickhouse →Distributed time-series database and scripting platform for quant finance and industrial analytics.
quasardb vs dolphindb →Purpose-built time-series database, rebuilt in Rust on Arrow, DataFusion and Parquet for version 3.
quasardb vs influxdb →quasardb FAQ
What is quasardb?
quasardb is a time-series database by QuasarDB SAS, first released in 2009. quasardb is a C++ distributed, column-oriented database with native time-series tables, built by the French company QuasarDB SAS (the GitHub organisation is still named bureau14) and now marketed simply as Quasar. It ingests high-rate timestamped data into sharded tables, compresses it aggressively and answers SQL-like queries with time-series extensions such as ASOF joins, LAG/LEAD and pre-aggregated tables, while also supporting key-value lookups. Its sweet spot is capital-markets tick data, industrial telemetry and other workloads where years of history and fresh data must be queried together. It is commercial software deployed in your own AWS, Azure or Google Cloud account, on-premises, at the edge or as an appliance, with official Python, Java, Go, .NET, C and REST clients; 3.14 is the current release line.
Is quasardb open source?
No. quasardb is proprietary, closed-source software.
Does quasardb support ACID transactions?
Yes. quasardb supports full ACID transactions, with strong consistency.
Does quasardb scale horizontally?
quasardb scales horizontally out of the box, with built-in sharding or partitioning. It is comfortable at large scale (≤ 1 PB).
How can I run quasardb?
You can self-host it and run it at the edge. It is available on AWS, Azure and Google Cloud.
What is quasardb best for?
quasardb is a strong fit for capital-markets tick and order-book history; industrial and IoT sensor telemetry; and backtesting and quantitative research over long histories. Think twice for general OLTP applications.
What are the best alternatives to quasardb?
Common alternatives to quasardb include kdb+, QuestDB, TimescaleDB, ClickHouse and DolphinDB. The right choice depends on your workload, scale and hosting; WhichDB's smart match ranks them against your requirements.
How popular is quasardb?
quasardb ranks #359 of 844 databases on the WhichDB Score (6.6/100), and #21 among time-series databases. The score combines public adoption signals such as package downloads, GitHub activity, job posts and developer discussion.