RisingWave FAQs — Everything You Need to Know in 30 Seconds

RisingWave is an event stream processing and management platform. It offers a unified experience for real-time data ingestion, stream processing, storage, and low-latency serving — all in one system.

To help you quickly understand RisingWave, here are the most frequently asked questions — answered with clarity and depth.

What Does a “Unified Platform for Streaming Data” Mean?

Unlike fragmented architectures that rely on multiple tools, RisingWave delivers an end-to-end streaming data platform:

• Ingestion: Supports both streaming and batch sources.

• Stream processing: Built-in, SQL-based processig.

• Persistence: Stores results in open formats such as Apache Iceberg™, ensuring low-cost and interoperable storage.

• Serving: Provides consistent, fresh results with sub-second latency.

How Does RisingWave’s Integrated Storage Engine Work?

RisingWave comes with a dual-mode storage engine:

• Online serving: Row-based storage enables ad-hoc point and range queries with single-digit millisecond latency.

• Offline persistence: Native Apache Iceberg™ integration ensures durable, cost-effective storage that can be queried by external engines like Spark, Trino, or Snowflake.

What Are the Key Design Decisions Behind RisingWave?

RisingWave was designed with scalability, interoperability, and developer experience in mind:

• PostgreSQL compatibility — wire-compatible with the PostgreSQL protocol.

• Cloud-native storage — stores tables, materialized views, and stream-processing states directly in Amazon S3.

• Elastic caching — caches hot data in memory and on disk (local disks or EBS).

• Native Apache Iceberg integration — continuously ingests and maintains Iceberg tables for open, shared analytics.

What Does PostgreSQL Compatibility Entail?

PostgreSQL compatibility makes RisingWave easy to adopt:

• Familiar SQL: Supports structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data.

• Seamless integration: Works with psql, JDBC clients, BI tools, and any PostgreSQL-compatible client.

• Simplified operations: Eliminates the need for manual state management or custom tuning.

What Are the Implications of Using S3 as Primary Storage?

RisingWave leverages Amazon S3 (or compatible object stores) as its primary storage layer:

• High performance: Optimized for joins, aggregations, and time windows.

• Fast recovery: Restores from failures within seconds.

• Dynamic scaling: Instantly scales to handle workload spikes.

Does RisingWave Support Elastic Disk Cache?

Yes. Beyond in-memory caching, RisingWave supports elastic disk cache, leveraging local disks or EBS:

• Reduces repeated S3 reads.

• Lowers query latency.

• Cuts down storage access costs.

What Does Native Apache Iceberg Integration Include?

RisingWave integrates with Apache Iceberg™ natively:

• Continuous ingestion of streaming data into Iceberg tables.

• Direct reads from Iceberg for downstream queries.

• Automatic compaction to maintain healthy tables.

• Open access so results can be queried by external engines without lock-in.

What Use Cases Is RisingWave Best Suited For?

RisingWave shines in scenarios requiring real-time, low-latency data processing:

• Streaming analytics: Live dashboards with sub-second data freshness.

• Event-driven applications: Real-time monitoring, alerting, and anomaly detection.

• Data enrichment pipelines: Continuously ingest and enhance data before delivery downstream.

• Feature engineering: Transform raw streams into ML-ready features.

How Does RisingWave Simplify Event-Driven Architectures?

RisingWave acts as a one-stop system for ingestion, processing, storage, and serving.

• Developers can express complex stream logic via cascaded materialized views.

• No need for external OLAP databases — data can be stored and queried directly in RisingWave.

How Is RisingWave Different From Traditional Stream Processors?

Compared to ksqlDB, Spark Structured Streaming, or Flink SQL, RisingWave:

• Provides a PostgreSQL-style SQL interface for simplicity.

• Handles complex queries (joins, time windows, aggregations) out-of-the-box.

• Offers transparent dynamic scaling (seconds vs minutes).

• Delivers instant recovery from failures.

How Is RisingWave Different From Analytical Databases?

Analytical databases (ClickHouse, Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks) support batch + micro-batch processing. RisingWave is purpose-built for true streaming:

• Rich stream-processing features like watermarks and windowing.

• Optimized for streaming joins at scale.

• Ingests from and delivers to any ecosystem without vendor lock-in.

How Is RisingWave Different From Operational Databases?

• Similarity: PostgreSQL compatibility means easy integration with existing PostgreSQL tools.

• Difference: RisingWave is designed for metrics and events — not transactional workloads — making it ideal for real-time pipelines.

What Is RisingWave Premium?

• Community Edition: Free, open-source, Apache 2.0 licensed.

• Premium Edition: Paid enterprise features — advanced security, scalability, and observability for mission-critical systems.

What Is RisingWave Console?

RisingWave Console is a management UI for monitoring and operating clusters:

• Centralized, web-based observability.

• Works with Docker, Kubernetes, or RisingWave Cloud.

• Simplifies deployment management.

Final Thoughts

RisingWave is more than just a streaming database — it’s a cloud-native, PostgreSQL-compatible real-time event streaming platform that unifies stream processing, storage, and serving.

If you’re looking to simplify your streaming architecture while cutting infrastructure costs, RisingWave is a strong choice.