How RisingWave has grown into one of the most complete real-time databases in the ecosystem.

The data infra stack is evolving—fast.

Startups and enterprises alike are rethinking how they build for real-time, AI-readiness, and cost-efficiency—without stitching together half a dozen tools.

Here’s how RisingWave has grown into one of the most complete real-time databases in the ecosystem.

15 Key Insights: RisingWave (2023–2025)
Trends, Milestones, and Strategic Directions

1. From Open Source to Enterprise-Grade
   2023: Born as an open-source streaming database
   2025: Launched a Premium Edition (v2.0+) with enterprise features: native Iceberg support, time-travel queries, RBAC, and compliance with AICPA SOC, GDPR, and HIPAA

2. Connector Ecosystem
   Supports 30+ native sources/sinks: Kafka, Redpanda, MongoDB, Snowflake, BigQuery, and more. Offers CDC, batch, append-only modes with real-time and file-based sinks

3. Unified Streaming + Batch
   v2.0 introduced hybrid processing — combining real-time pipelines with historical file ingestion (e.g., Parquet, Iceberg)

4. High-Performance Delivery
   Sink decoupling, adaptive parallelism (2023), and rate limiting (2025) for smoother, autoscaled workloads

5. Developer Experience
   Free developer tier, Python SDK, single-node mode, and native integrations with dbt, SQLMesh, PostgreSQL FDW

6. Observability
   System catalogs (e.g., rw_ddl_progress) and Prometheus/Grafana metrics for debugging and capacity planning

7. Security & Compliance
   OAuth2, RBAC, secret management, cloud identity integration (AWS IAM, GCP IAM), with full enterprise compliance

8. Cloud-Native Deployment
   BYOC support (AWS, GCP, Azure), Terraform modules, and Kubernetes-native deployment

9. Production Use Cases
   Trusted by 1,000+ companies in finance, manufacturing, e-commerce, ad tech, and more — enabling real-time, event-driven pipelines

10. Open Source Momentum
    7.6K GitHub stars, 2.6K Slack members, and 160+ contributors. Gaining adoption for its SQL expressiveness and runtime performance

11. SQL & Language Extensibility
    Window functions, temporal joins, schema evolution, plus UDFs in Python and Rust.

12. Cost Efficiency
    Tiered storage, object store optimizations, and smart batching in sinks lower TCO.

13. Schema Flexibility
    Schemaless ingestion and auto-schema evolution (PostgreSQL, MySQL) with native CDC.

14. Ecosystem Integrations
    Deep integration with Kafka, Iceberg, Delta Lake, PostgreSQL, Snowflake, BigQuery, DynamoDB, StarRocks and more.

15. Vision: AI-Ready Platform
    Event-driven agents
    LLM-native features
    Vector search
    RAG over structured + unstructured data
    Table format interoperability (Iceberg, Delta)

Why This Matters?
Engineers get a unified alternative to Flink, Kafka, and Postgres
Enterprises gain secure, compliant, and cost-aware real-time infrastructure.
DevOps teams enjoy seamless observability and cloud-native ops.
RisingWave is building for the future: real-time, AI-integrated, and developer-first