The engineering blog of GreptimeDB, an open-source Rust time-series database, covering observability, performance, and Rust practices.
HN commenters add related Rust error handling and memory profiling guides from the blog, and note its earlier piece showing Go protobuf was competitive.
In the article the "Materialized view for data derivation" part does the heavy lifting.
I assume this means they are creating time-series (indices) on-the-fly (with eventual backfill of the data). For the "exploratory analytics" the techniques developed for Dremel/Drill/Impala [0] are sufficient, and for anything else raw data crunching speeds are really impressive nowadays. (And they claim they can ingest 1B JSON records in ~10-30 seconds [1].)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dremel_(software)
[1] https://greptime.com/blogs/2025-03-18-jsonbench-greptimedb-performance
The following articles may also be of interest to the audience:
- The definitive guide to error handling in Rust [0]
- Error Handling for Large Rust Projects - Best Practice in GreptimeDB [1]
- Designing error types in Rust [2]
- Modular Errors in Rust [3]
[0]: https://www.howtocodeit.com/articles/the-definitive-guide-to-rust-error-handling [1]: https://greptime.com/blogs/2024-05-07-error-rust [2]: https://mmapped.blog/posts/12-rust-error-handling [3]: https://sabrinajewson.org/blog/errors
great one! and i would recommnd this hands-on guide for diagnosing memory leaks in Rust applications. it explains how to enable heap profiling in 'jemalloc', collect memory allocation data, and generate flame graphs for analysis. https://greptime.com/blogs/2024-01-18-memory-leak#diagnosing-memory-leaks-with-flame-graphs-and-jemalloc
It's interesting and cool! Looks like the software stack is still running on the local server.
Looking for Prometheus and Grafana on the cloud? Check out GreptimeCloud! https://greptime.com/
was hoping to see https://github.com/GreptimeTeam/greptimedb on the list
maybe 2026, or some bonus content for 2025 :)
https://www.greptime.com/blogs/2024-09-09-report-summary
Even before Hyperpb, Go was already very competitive, e.g. this article from last year: https://www.greptime.com/blogs/2024-04-09-rust-protobuf-performance