Best Free Columnar Databases of 2025

BigQuery is a database designed to organize information in columns instead of rows, a configuration that greatly accelerates analytical queries. This streamlined layout minimizes the volume of data that needs to be scanned, resulting in enhanced query performance, particularly when dealing with substantial datasets. The columnar format is especially advantageous for executing intricate analytical queries, as it enables more effective handling of individual data columns. New users can take advantage of BigQuery’s columnar database features by utilizing $300 in free credits, allowing them to experiment with how this structure can optimize their data processing and analytics efficiency. Additionally, the columnar storage format offers improved data compression, leading to better storage utilization and quicker query execution.

StarTree Cloud is a fully-managed real-time analytics platform designed for OLAP at massive speed and scale for user-facing applications. Powered by Apache Pinot, StarTree Cloud provides enterprise-grade reliability and advanced capabilities such as tiered storage, scalable upserts, plus additional indexes and connectors. It integrates seamlessly with transactional databases and event streaming platforms, ingesting data at millions of events per second and indexing it for lightning-fast query responses. StarTree Cloud is available on your favorite public cloud or for private SaaS deployment. StarTree Cloud includes StarTree Data Manager, which allows you to ingest data from both real-time sources such as Amazon Kinesis, Apache Kafka, Apache Pulsar, or Redpanda, as well as batch data sources such as data warehouses like Snowflake, Delta Lake or Google BigQuery, or object stores like Amazon S3, Apache Flink, Apache Hadoop, or Apache Spark. StarTree ThirdEye is an add-on anomaly detection system running on top of StarTree Cloud that observes your business-critical metrics, alerting you and allowing you to perform root-cause analysis — all in real-time.

Apache Cassandra is an ideal database solution for situations that require both high scalability and availability while maintaining optimal performance. Its linear scalability and established fault-tolerance capabilities, whether on standard hardware or cloud environments, position it as a top-tier choice for essential data management. Additionally, Cassandra excels in its ability to replicate data across various datacenters, ensuring minimal latency for users and offering reassurance by safeguarding against regional failures. This unique combination of features makes Cassandra a reliable option for businesses that prioritize resilience and efficiency in their data operations.

ClickHouse is an efficient, open-source OLAP database management system designed for high-speed data processing. Its column-oriented architecture facilitates the creation of analytical reports through real-time SQL queries. In terms of performance, ClickHouse outshines similar column-oriented database systems currently on the market. It has the capability to handle hundreds of millions to over a billion rows, as well as tens of gigabytes of data, on a single server per second. By maximizing the use of available hardware, ClickHouse ensures rapid query execution. The peak processing capacity for individual queries can exceed 2 terabytes per second, considering only the utilized columns after decompression. In a distributed environment, read operations are automatically optimized across available replicas to minimize latency. Additionally, ClickHouse features multi-master asynchronous replication, enabling deployment across various data centers. Each node operates equally, effectively eliminating potential single points of failure and enhancing overall reliability. This robust architecture allows organizations to maintain high availability and performance even under heavy workloads.

Greenplum Database® stands out as a sophisticated, comprehensive, and open-source data warehouse solution. It excels in providing swift and robust analytics on data volumes that reach petabyte scales. Designed specifically for big data analytics, Greenplum Database is driven by a highly advanced cost-based query optimizer that ensures exceptional performance for analytical queries on extensive data sets. This project operates under the Apache 2 license, and we extend our gratitude to all current contributors while inviting new ones to join our efforts. In the Greenplum Database community, every contribution is valued, regardless of its size, and we actively encourage diverse forms of involvement. This platform serves as an open-source, massively parallel data environment tailored for analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence applications. Users can swiftly develop and implement models aimed at tackling complex challenges in fields such as cybersecurity, predictive maintenance, risk management, and fraud detection, among others. Dive into the experience of a fully integrated, feature-rich open-source analytics platform that empowers innovation.

The enterprise database for time series, documents, and vectors. Store any type data and combine the simplicity and scalability NoSQL with SQL. CrateDB is a distributed database that runs queries in milliseconds regardless of the complexity, volume, and velocity.

The Unified Analytics Warehouse. The Unified Analytics Warehouse is the best place to find high-performing analytics and machine learning at large scale. Tech research analysts are seeing new leaders as they strive to deliver game-changing big data analytics. Vertica empowers data-driven companies so they can make the most of their analytics initiatives. It offers advanced time-series, geospatial, and machine learning capabilities, as well as data lake integration, user-definable extensions, cloud-optimized architecture and more. Vertica's Under the Hood webcast series allows you to dive into the features of Vertica - delivered by Vertica engineers, technical experts, and others - and discover what makes it the most scalable and scalable advanced analytical data database on the market. Vertica supports the most data-driven disruptors around the globe in their pursuit for industry and business transformation.

Apache Druid is a powerful open-source distributed data storage solution that integrates principles from data warehousing, timeseries databases, and search technologies to deliver exceptional performance for real-time analytics across various applications. Its innovative design synthesizes essential features from these three types of systems, which is evident in its ingestion layer, storage format, query execution, and foundational architecture. By individually storing and compressing each column, Druid efficiently accesses only the necessary data for specific queries, enabling rapid scanning, sorting, and grouping operations. Additionally, Druid utilizes inverted indexes for string values to enhance search and filtering speeds. Equipped with ready-to-use connectors for platforms like Apache Kafka, HDFS, and AWS S3, Druid seamlessly integrates with existing data workflows. Its smart partitioning strategy greatly accelerates time-based queries compared to conventional databases, allowing for impressive performance. Users can easily scale their systems by adding or removing servers, with Druid automatically managing the rebalancing of data. Furthermore, its fault-tolerant design ensures that the system can effectively navigate around server failures, maintaining operational integrity. This resilience makes Druid an excellent choice for organizations seeking reliable analytics solutions.