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 employs Multi-version Concurrency Control (MVCC) in its cloud-native LSM-Tree-based storage engine. It creates one checkpoint at a time (as opposed to concurrent checkpointing), and performs read operation on the most-recently committed checkpoint. Read operation that immediately follows a write operation may not see the newest change if the two operations are performed on different compute nodes.

Data Model[16]

RisingWave uses a relational data model. Relational tables are composed of a list of strong-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.

Query Interface

System Architecture