What is PipelineDB used for?

PipelineDB was an Apache-licensed PostgreSQL extension for high-performance, continuous time-series aggregation, now discontinued after its team joined Confluent. It is a good fit for real-time analytics dashboards on PostgreSQL and high-throughput time-series aggregation.

Is PipelineDB open source?

Yes. PipelineDB is open source under the Apache-2.0 licence. Its source code is on GitHub at pipelinedb/pipelinedb and is written mainly in C.

Yes. PipelineDB is open source, so the software itself is free to use.

Can I self-host PipelineDB?

Yes. PipelineDB can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure; there is no official hosted version.

What are some alternatives to PipelineDB?

Similar open-source tools in the Databases category include TimescaleDB, TDengine and QuestDB. SaaS products in the same category include Amazon Athena, Amazon Redshift and Azure Data Explorer.

Is PipelineDB actively maintained?

The most recent commit to PipelineDB was on 20 February 2022, and the latest release is 1.0.0-13, published on 19 February 2019. The project has 2.7k stars on GitHub.

PipelineDB: open-source databases

About PipelineDB

PipelineDB was a PostgreSQL extension designed for high-performance time-series aggregation, built to power real-time reporting and analytics applications. It let developers define continuous SQL queries that perpetually aggregated incoming time-series data, storing only the aggregated output in regular, queryable tables rather than the raw data itself.

This approach worked like an extremely high-throughput materialized view that updated incrementally and never needed to be manually refreshed, since raw time-series data was never written to disk, making it efficient for aggregation-heavy workloads. Continuous queries produced their own output streams, so they could be chained together into arbitrary networks of continuous SQL.

The README states that PipelineDB joined Confluent and that the project would receive no new releases beyond 1.0.0, though critical bugs would still be fixed. It ran on 64-bit systems with PostgreSQL 10 and 11, required ZeroMQ for inter-process communication, and was written in C and released under the Apache-2.0 license. New projects should look at actively maintained streaming or aggregation tools instead.

Key features

Continuous SQL aggregation queries
Incrementally updated materialized views
No raw time-series data written to disk
Chainable continuous query output streams
PostgreSQL extension architecture

Good fit for

→Real-time analytics dashboards on PostgreSQL
→High-throughput time-series aggregation

Built with: C; PostgreSQL
Tags: postgresql; time-series; stream-processing; analytics; sql; deprecated; aggregation

PipelineDB: questions and answers

What is PipelineDB used for?: PipelineDB was an Apache-licensed PostgreSQL extension for high-performance, continuous time-series aggregation, now discontinued after its team joined Confluent. It is a good fit for real-time analytics dashboards on PostgreSQL and high-throughput time-series aggregation.
Is PipelineDB open source?: Yes. PipelineDB is open source under the Apache-2.0 licence. Its source code is on GitHub at pipelinedb/pipelinedb and is written mainly in C.
Is PipelineDB free?: Yes. PipelineDB is open source, so the software itself is free to use.
Can I self-host PipelineDB?: Yes. PipelineDB can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure; there is no official hosted version.
What are some alternatives to PipelineDB?: Similar open-source tools in the Databases category include TimescaleDB, TDengine and QuestDB. SaaS products in the same category include Amazon Athena, Amazon Redshift and Azure Data Explorer.
Is PipelineDB actively maintained?: The most recent commit to PipelineDB was on 20 February 2022, and the latest release is 1.0.0-13, published on 19 February 2019. The project has 2.7k stars on GitHub.