Comparison between risingwave and materialize

[sunisdown]

I'm excited to find risingwave project and now we more choice for streaming database, especially risingwave is under Apache 2.0. It seems that both risingwave and materialize have simlar features( streaming, database, materlialize, written in Rust).
I am trying to learn the main architectural differences between these two project. when should we use risingwave?

[yingjunwu]

Thanks for your interest in RisingWave! As the founder of Singularity Data, the startup initiating the RisingWave project, I am probably the best person to answer this question.

First of all, please allow me to express my great respect to the Materialize team, for their excellent work in modernizing the stream processing infra! While sharing lots of common friends in both academia and industry, I have to admit that I haven't had any chance to speak to their team discussing Materialize's roadmap. So it's definitely unfair if I comment too much on their product. But I will still try my best to answer your question in an unbiased manner.

Similarities

• Both teams are great, and both teams have very strong research and engineering background!!!
• Both RisingWave and Materialize are streaming databases - databases that can effectively process streaming data;
• Both RisingWave and Materialize support PostgreSQL protocol and can seamlessly integrate with the PostgreSQL ecosystem;
• Both RisingWave and Materialize are written in Rust.

Differences

• Architecture: The open-source version of Materialize is a single-node streaming database. In contrast, RisingWave is a distributed database that has decoupled database frontend and backend;
• Design: Materialize is a SQL database built on top of Timely Dataflow, a horizontally scalable low-latency dataflow engine. Obviously, Materialize is built in a bottom-up manner: their team designed the computation abstraction first and then built the SQL engine on top of it. In contrast, we chose the opposite way (top-down manner) to build RisingWave: the runtime is specifically optimized for the SQL operators.
• Focus: it's related to the business, so you'd better confirm with Materialize team. But from their blog, it seems that their focus is on delivering strong consistency without compromising performance. RisingWave's focus is quite clear: we want to democratize stream processing, to make stream processing simple, affordable, and accessible. We do care about consistency and performance, just as all other streaming systems do.
• License: Materialize is under BSL, while RisingWave is under Apache 2.0.

Above are my (incomplete) answers. I stopped writing as It's Saturday and I don't want to overwork. For sure there are more differences if you take a deeper look into these two systems. Please feel free to let me know if I missed anything. Thanks!