How does QuestDB get the kind of performance it does, and how are we continuing to squeeze another 50-60% out of it? This post will look at a code change we thought would create a negative performance impact, which actually brought a substantial boost in the system's overall performance and demonstrates that we are constantly learning more about performance improvements.
In the world of databases, benchmarking performance has always been the hottest topic. Who is faster for data ingestion and queries? About a month ago we announced a new release with SIMD aggregations on HackerNews and Reddit. Fast. But were those results numerically accurate?
SIMD instructions are specific CPU instruction sets for arithmetic calculations that use synthetic parallelization. This approach allows us to perform the same calculations and operations on numerous data points simultaneously. This post describes how SIMD works with typical operation performance and describes additional optimizations we managed to achieve.
InfluxDB is the current market leader in time series. This post examines their ingestion format called InfluxDB line protocol ("ILP") and compares data ingestion performance between QuestDB and InfluxDB. We'll look at data loss over UDP and some of the reasons why QuestDB is more efficient at ingesting records in ILP.