Assembly Line

PikiwiDB

Pikiwidb is a Redis-Compatible database developed by Qihoo's infrastructure team.

PikiwiDB is an open-source database project on GitHub under the BSD-3-Clause license (permissive), with 6.1k stars. It is built with LLVM project and Go. Its last push was 18 days ago.

Stars
6.1k
License
BSD-3-Clause
Activity
Active
Latest release
v4.0.4

Code on GitHub

Judgement

What it is
Building block
What it does
A Redis-compatible key-value database that stores data on disk in RocksDB, allowing datasets far larger than memory.
Adopt it when
Your Redis data has grown too large or costly to keep in RAM and you can accept disk-level latency.
Watch out
Documentation and community are largely Chinese, and not every Redis command behaves identically.
Ready for
Production-ready
Runs as
Self-hosted server
Built with
C++, RocksDB and Go
How established
Established: started 12 years ago, latest release v4.0.4.
What the license allows
You can build it into a product you sell, as long as you keep its copyright notice.

Judged on 2026-11-03 from the project's README and GitHub data. The license and age lines are worked out directly.

Built from

Follow it down: PikiwiDB → LLVM project → runs on a microchip

How compilers were built, back to punched paper tape

Open-source alternatives to PikiwiDB

  1. 1
    Prometheus prometheus

    The Prometheus monitoring system and time series database.

    Complete system Production-ready You run services or Kubernetes and need metrics and alerting with the de facto standard toolset.

    ★ 67k Apache-2.0 Go Active, pushed today
  2. 2
    Etcd etcd-io

    Distributed reliable key-value store for the most critical data of a distributed system

    Building block Production-ready You need a small amount of critical coordination data kept consistent across a cluster.

    ★ 52k Apache-2.0 Go Active, pushed today
  3. 3
    ClickHouse ClickHouse

    ClickHouse® is a real-time analytics database management system

    Building block Production-ready You need fast analytics on large append-heavy data such as events, logs or metrics.

    ★ 51k Apache-2.0 C++ Active, pushed today
  4. 4
    Milvus milvus-io

    Milvus is a high-performance, cloud-native vector database built for scalable vector ANN search

    Building block Production-ready You need vector search over hundreds of millions of embeddings or more and have the people to run a distributed system.

    ★ 47k Apache-2.0 Go Active, pushed today
  5. 5
    DuckDB duckdb

    DuckDB is a high-performance analytical database system

    Building block Production-ready You analyse data that fits on one machine and want fast SQL without running a server.

    ★ 43k MIT C++ Active, pushed today
  6. 6
    TiDB pingcap

    TiDB is built for agentic workloads that grow unpredictably, with ACID guarantees and native support for transactions, analytics, and vector search. No data silos. No noisy neighbors. No infrastructure ceiling.

    Building block Production-ready You run MySQL workloads that have outgrown one server and need to scale out without manual sharding.

    ★ 41k Apache-2.0 Go Active, pushed today
  7. 7
    Qdrant qdrant

    Qdrant - High-performance, massive-scale Vector Database and Vector Search Engine for the next generation of AI. Also available in the cloud https://cloud.qdrant.io/

    Building block Production-ready You are building semantic search, RAG or recommendations and want a dedicated vector store that is simple to self-host.

    ★ 35k Apache-2.0 Rust Active, pushed today
  8. 8
    Cognee topoteretes

    Cognee is the open-source AI memory platform for agents. Give your AI agents persistent long-term memory with small models for free

    Building block Usable You build agents that need long-term memory across sessions and want graph-based retrieval rather than plain vector RAG.

    ★ 33k Apache-2.0 Python Active, pushed today

Commercial databases

  1. 1
    Snowflake Snowflake Inc.

    Snowflake powers AI, data engineering, applications, and analytics on a trusted, scalable AI Data Cloud—eliminating silos and accelerating innovation.

    Complete system Production-ready A company has many data sources to combine for analytics and wants a managed warehouse that scales without tuning.

    6.5k readers a month Since 2012 Commercial
  2. 2
    MongoDB Atlas MongoDB, Inc.

    Build AI applications and agents on MongoDB Atlas platform, the #1 modern, run anywhere platform that brings together real-time data, intelligent retrieval, and governed action.

    Building block Production-ready Your app suits a JSON document model and you want MongoDB without running it yourself.

    4.1k readers a month Since 2009 Commercial
  3. 3
    Oracle Database Oracle Corporation

    Proprietary database management system

    Building block Production-ready A large enterprise runs software that requires Oracle, or needs its high-end availability features.

    2.2k readers a month Since 1979 Commercial
  4. 4
    Microsoft SQL Server Microsoft

    SQL Server 2025 redefines what's possible for enterprise data. With developer-first features and integration with analytics and AI models, SQL Server 2025 accelerates AI innovation using the data you already have.

    Building block Production-ready Your business runs .NET applications or vendor software that requires SQL Server.

    945 readers a month Commercial
  5. 5
    Google BigQuery Google

    BigQuery is the autonomous data and AI platform, automating the entire data life cycle so you can go from data to AI to action faster.

    Complete system Production-ready You are on Google Cloud or export GA4 data and want SQL analytics without managing servers.

    313 readers a month Since 2010 Commercial
  6. 6
    InfluxDB Cloud InfluxData

    InfluxDB 3 is the leading time series database to collect, organize, and act on massive volumes of high-resolution data in real-time.

    Building block Production-ready You collect high-volume IoT or monitoring metrics and want a purpose-built time-series store you do not run yourself.

    298 readers a month Since 2013 Commercial

Stars, license and activity come from GitHub and refresh on a rolling hourly schedule. The project's own description is quoted as written.