arc

Arc wraps DuckDB's SQL engine, Parquet storage, and Arrow format into a single Go binary that ingests 18M+ records per second and queries 6M+ rows per second. Your data lands in standard Parquet files on S3 or local disk — readable by ClickHouse, Snowflake, DuckDB, or anything else that speaks Parquet. No proprietary formats, no vendor lock-in.

If you need a lightweight analytical database for observability, IoT, or product analytics without running a ClickHouse cluster, Arc is worth watching. QuestDB is the established time-series competitor (Arc claims 1.8x faster on ClickBench). TimescaleDB is the PostgreSQL-native option. ClickHouse is the heavyweight for production analytics at scale.

The catch: Arc is brand new — 564 stars, AGPL-3.0 licensed, and from a startup nobody has heard of yet. Performance claims on benchmarks don't equal production reliability. The AGPL license means any modifications must be open-sourced, and network use triggers the copyleft. For anything production-critical, ClickHouse or QuestDB have years of battle-testing that Arc simply doesn't.