RisingWave
activeby RisingWave Labs · since 2022 · also known as RisingWave Cloud
An Apache-licensed, Postgres-compatible streaming database that stores state on S3 and writes Iceberg.
Overview
RisingWave is a distributed SQL streaming database: you define sources (Kafka, Pulsar, Kinesis, Postgres/MySQL CDC), materialized views and sinks in Postgres-flavoured SQL, and it maintains results incrementally. State lives in its Hummock LSM store on object storage, which makes recovery fast and compute elastic, and it can serve queries directly or sink to Iceberg, ClickHouse and other systems. Licensed Apache 2.0 with a managed cloud from RisingWave Labs, it is a common open-source alternative to Flink SQL for teams who want streaming without writing JVM jobs.
Strengths & trade-offs
Strengths
- +Streaming SQL with Postgres compatibility instead of Java/Scala jobs
- +State on object storage enables quick recovery and elastic compute
- +Can both process streams and serve query results
- +Native Iceberg sink and table engine for streaming lakehouse
- +Apache 2.0 license
Trade-offs
- −Not a replacement for an OLTP or general OLAP database
- −Object-storage state can add latency for very large joins
- −Postgres compatibility is partial (no full PL/pgSQL, limited DDL)
Great for
- +Streaming ETL from Kafka or CDC into Iceberg
- +Real-time monitoring and alerting dashboards
- +Fresh ML feature computation
- +IoT telemetry aggregation
Think twice for
- −Transactional application backends
- −Batch-only historical analytics
Capabilities
Native or official first-party support · 11 of 25 tracked
Scale & consistency
- Comfortable data size
- Large · ≤ 1 PB
- Horizontal scaling
- Native
- Multi-region
- No
- Transactions
- Limited ACID
- Consistency
- Strong
- Schema
- Strict
- Architecture
- Distributed, Shared storage, Client server
- Query languages
- SQL
Compute nodes scale independently; state on S3-compatible storage.
Deployment
available on · AWS · Google Cloud · Azure
Ecosystem
Alternatives to RisingWave
A Postgres-compatible operational data warehouse that keeps SQL views incrementally up to date.
risingwave vs materialize →An incremental SQL engine grounded in DBSP theory that updates any SQL query from changes only.
risingwave vs feldera →A Rust stream processor with SQL pipelines, now owned by Cloudflare and powering Cloudflare Pipelines.
risingwave vs arroyo →A single C++ binary for streaming SQL, built on ClickHouse's engine with streams and windows.
risingwave vs timeplus-proton →Confluent's SQL layer over Kafka Streams, still supported but superseded by Flink SQL for new work.
risingwave vs ksqldb →Spark's SQL and DataFrame engine for large-scale batch, streaming and lakehouse processing.
risingwave vs apache-spark-sql →RisingWave FAQ
What is RisingWave?
RisingWave is a relational database by RisingWave Labs, first released in 2022. RisingWave is a distributed SQL streaming database: you define sources (Kafka, Pulsar, Kinesis, Postgres/MySQL CDC), materialized views and sinks in Postgres-flavoured SQL, and it maintains results incrementally. State lives in its Hummock LSM store on object storage, which makes recovery fast and compute elastic, and it can serve queries directly or sink to Iceberg, ClickHouse and other systems. Licensed Apache 2.0 with a managed cloud from RisingWave Labs, it is a common open-source alternative to Flink SQL for teams who want streaming without writing JVM jobs.
Is RisingWave open source?
Yes. RisingWave is open source. License: Apache License 2.0.
Does RisingWave support ACID transactions?
Partly. RisingWave offers limited ACID guarantees (for example, single-record or single-partition transactions), with strong consistency.
Does RisingWave scale horizontally?
RisingWave scales horizontally out of the box, with built-in sharding or partitioning. It is comfortable at large scale (≤ 1 PB).
How can I run RisingWave?
You can self-host it and use the vendor's managed cloud. Managed offerings include RisingWave Cloud. It is available on AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.
What is RisingWave best for?
RisingWave is a strong fit for streaming ETL from Kafka or CDC into Iceberg; real-time monitoring and alerting dashboards; and fresh ML feature computation. Think twice for transactional application backends.
What are the best alternatives to RisingWave?
Common alternatives to RisingWave include Materialize, Feldera, Arroyo, Timeplus Proton and ksqlDB. The right choice depends on your workload, scale and hosting; WhichDB's smart match ranks them against your requirements.
How popular is RisingWave?
RisingWave ranks #191 of 844 databases on the WhichDB Score (17.4/100), and #60 among relational databases. The score combines public adoption signals such as package downloads, GitHub activity, job posts and developer discussion.