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Rockset Alternatives: What to do following their acquisition by OpenAI

Written by
Rogan Sage
last updated on
October 4, 2024

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The tech landscape is ever-evolving, and with OpenAI's recent acquisition of Rockset, users are understandably curious about what comes next. As OpenAI integrates Rockset into its portfolio, existing Rockset customers are being transitioned off the platform and will have to find an alternative.

This significant shift means it's crucial for current users, including those currently within their trial period, to understand the implications and prepare for alternative solutions. 

In this article, we'll dive into the key things you need to know and highlight two top-notch alternatives: ClickHouse and StarTree, both renowned for their prowess in real-time analytics.

What you need to know

Rockset announced on 21st June 2024 that:

Rockset will become part of OpenAI” “Existing Rockset customers will experience no immediate change. We will gradually transition current customers off Rockset and are committed to ensuring a smooth process.”

Despite promising no immediate change, the window of opportunity to get your ducks in a row is pretty tight with all existing Rockset customers being transitioned off the platform by Monday 30th September 2024 at 17:00 PDT.

This requires users to migrate their data and workflows to new platforms - and whilst documentation and support are limited right now, they have ‘committed to a smooth process’. 

Right now, that includes help from Rockset customer support via email at support@rockset.com or via a support ticket. Monday - Friday, 7am - 5pm PDT (San Francisco time). Their FAQ can be found here, which we expect to be updated with more information over the coming weeks. 

Be aware that transition periods can bring shifts in customer support and service stability. Users should brace for changes in support channels, response times, and possibly new terms of service.

Top Alternatives: ClickHouse and StarTree

Given these shifts, exploring alternatives as soon as possible is a recommended course of action. 

If you’re using Rockset, then you most-likely have a need to query vast amounts of data and get lightning-fast responses. This kind of requirement usually emerges when you’re looking to run business intelligence or customer-facing analytics on top of vast database - but it can be for various use cases, including:

  • Real-time dashboards
  • Real-time analytics
  • Business intelligence (BI)
  • Data warehouse speed layer
  • Logging and metrics
  • Machine learning (ML) and data science 

If these are on your mind, then let’s delve into why ClickHouse and StarTree stand out as excellent options.

Migrate to StarTree

StarTree enables companies to build high-performing real-time applications on vast datasets via their fully-managed platform, StarTree Cloud, powered by Apache Pinot. It was designed for scalability while providing sub-second latency results when serving millions of users. StarTree Cloud can ingest a petabyte or more of data at rates of 100,000+ Queries per Second (QPS).

StarTree powers enterprise-grade analytics implementations for market-leading companies like Just Eat Takeaway and Stripe that require vast volumes of data to be queried and made available at the visualization layer in real-time.

It's also possible to test StarTree with their new Free Tier, which supports some pretty serious workloads and can help you get a good feel for its performance before moving onto a paid plan later if you need to.

Why StarTree?

  • Powered by Apache Pinot: StarTree leverages the power of Apache Pinot, a distributed real-time OLAP datastore designed for low-latency analytics.
  • User-Centric Approach: Focuses on delivering real-time, user-facing analytics, ensuring end-users receive timely and actionable insights.
  • Scalability and Flexibility: Offers a scalable solution that can handle high-throughput data streams, making it ideal for dynamic data environments.

Key Features:

  • Real-Time Insights: Processes data in real-time, providing instant analytics and minimizing decision-making delays.
  • High Throughput: Handles high-velocity data with ease, making it suitable for modern, data-intensive applications.
  • Developer Friendly: Provides robust APIs and tools that simplify integration and customization, enhancing developer productivity.

Migrate to ClickHouse

‍ClickHouse is a column-oriented, distributed, and OLAP database that’s very easy to set up and maintain. ClickHouse allows you to query and also perform several million writes per millisecond (check for yourself here), making this a very efficient database. ClickHouse also optimizes ingest throughput by batching data ingestion. This makes it great for high-volume ingest.

“Because it’s columnar, it’s the best architectural approach for aggregations and for ‘sort by’ on more than one column. It also means that group by’s are very fast. It’s distributed, replication is asynchronous, and it’s OLAP—which means it’s meant for analytics,” says Tyler Hannan, Senior Director of Developer Advocacy at ClickHouse.

This database provider uses materialized views for performance. This means you need to know how your query patterns will look upfront to get the best performance. And once you do, it makes ClickHouse a great alternative to your Rockset setup!

Why ClickHouse?

  • Blazing Fast Performance: ClickHouse is celebrated for its unmatched speed in handling large volumes of data with real-time query processing.
  • Columnar Storage: Its efficient columnar storage format reduces query time significantly, making it ideal for high-frequency analytics.
  • Open Source Flexibility: As an open-source solution, ClickHouse provides unparalleled flexibility and customization options, backed by a vibrant community.

Key Features:

  • Real-Time Analytics: Delivers instant insights, making it perfect for applications requiring low-latency data processing.
  • Scalability: Easily scales with your data, ensuring consistent performance as your datasets grow.
  • Robust Ecosystem: Strong support for integrations with various data ingestion tools, making it a seamless fit into your existing data pipeline.

In Summary

Although you can no longer use Rockset, there are some great alternatives out there to help you get most of the key benefits it was built to provide. We recommend both StarTree and ClickHouse as strong options that you may want to consider. 

The best way to find out is to speak to them directly which you can do via their websites: https://startree.ai/  and https://clickhouse.com/.

Working on Analytics?

If you have a need for real-time analytics / dashboards, then you may also be interested in Embeddable: our developer toolkit for building remarkable analytics experiences that load lightning-fast, and feel completely native in your application. 

Embeddable is an embedded analytics tool that takes a headless approach, giving you the full flexibility and control of a custom build, whilst giving you the benefits of an off-the-shelf embedded analytics tool (minus the clunky iframes!).

With the help of Embeddable, we’re able to deliver a user experience that surpasses that of other vendors in our space who often have 10x+ the team and budget.” Julian McCarty, CEO of Mosaic Voice.