Over the last decade, QuestDB has been at the forefront of handling time series data with a focus on speed and efficiency. In this talk, I’ll share practical insights from our experience serving thousands of users, highlighting what we’ve learned about building and maintaining a fast database that can ingest millions of events per second.

QuestDB, an open-source time series database, has traditionally relied on a custom-built, non-standard data storage format designed for performance. As we move forward, we’re actively developing its architecture to support open formats like Apache Parquet and Arrow, reflecting a broader industry shift. I’ll discuss the engineering challenges we’ve faced during this transition, the new possibilities it creates, and why these changes are crucial for the evolving database landscape.

Through live demos, I’ll showcase QuestDB’s performance in real-time data ingestion and queries, and demonstrate some of the features enabled by these new formats.