History[08][09]

RisingWave Database is built by RisingWave Labs (formerly known as Singularity Data), a database systems startup founded in 2021 by former IBM researcher and Amazon Redshift engineer Yingjun Wu.

While working at Amazon Redshift, Wu noticed that existing database systems cannot process streaming data efficiently and existing streaming systems were too complicated for most companies to use. This observation motivated Wu to found RisingWave Labs with a mission to “democratize stream processing”.

Checkpoints[10][11][12]

RisingWave uses the Chandy–Lamport algorithm to create consistent checkpoints.

To ensure that data is correct and consistent, read queries always fetch data from the most recent checkpoint. This means RisingWave does not ensure read-after-write consistency.

A local shared buffer is used to stage uncommitted write batches submitted by operators. The storage manager will notify all operators to commit their buffered writes into the shared storage when checkpoint trigger message has reached all operators.

Compression[13][14]

RisingWave applies both naive compression and prefix compression at block-level. It uses LZ4 and Zstd for naive compression.

Concurrency Control[15]

RisingWave does not support concurrency control in its compute engine. However, it does employ Multi-version Concurrency Control (MVCC) in its cloud-native LSM-Tree-based storage engine.

Data Model[16]

RisingWave uses a relational data model. Relational tables are composed of a list of strongly-typed columns. All columns are implicitly nullable. RisingWave supports primitive data types of: boolean, integer, fixed-point and floating-point numbers, strings, and temporals. Composite data types of struct and list are also supported.

Foreign Keys

Indexes[17][15]

RisingWave does not support traditional index data structures. Instead, index is implemented as a specialized materialized view. RisingWave's storage engine stores materialized view as key-value pairs in log-structured merge trees.

Isolation Levels

Joins[18][19][20]

RisingWave supports join with hash join, nested loop join, and index nested loop join (also called lookup join). RisingWave has two execution modes: the batch-query mode and the streaming mode. All three join strategies are used in the batch-query mode, while only hash join and lookup join are used in the streaming mode. The supported join types are: inner join, left outer join, right outer join, and full outer join. RisingWave supports time window functions, window joins are also supported.

Logging[11]

Parallel Execution[21][22][23][24]

RisingWave supports bushy parallelism in both its batch-query and streaming modes. Consistent hashing is employed to partition data for parallel execution.

Query Compilation

Query Execution[25][16]

RisingWave adopts a vectorized model.

Query Interface[26][27]

The RisingWave SQL query interface is mostly compatible with PostgreSQL. It has client library in Java, Node.js, Python, and Go. RisingWave also offers UDF API for Python. RisingWave is wire compatible with PostgreSQL, and can be accessed with PostgreSQL terminal psql. As a cloud-native database, RisingWave can be integrated with cloud services such as Confluent Cloud, DataStax, and Grafana Cloud. To support stream processing, RisingWave can be integrated with the following message brokers or streaming services: Kafka, Redpanda, Apache Pulsar, DataStax Astra Streaming, StreamNative Cloud, and Kinesis Data Streams.

Storage Architecture[15][12]

RisingWave has a disc-oriented storage architecture. Its storage engine uses shared storage to store files.

Storage Model[15][28][16]

RisingWave uses the row store format, in which each row is encoded into key-value entries. All key-value pairs are stored in block-based SSTables. Each SST consists of two files. The .data file is composed of 64kb sized blocks containing the actual key-value pairs. A second .meta file contains metadata such as min-max index, Bloom filter, and per-block metadata.

System Architecture