Should I Use a Database or Stream Processor for my Real-Time Application? | RTA Summit 2025

With great power comes great responsibility, but with so many powerful real-time technologies like Kafka, Pinot, Flink, KSQL and Temporal how can you responsibly choose the right ones for your real-time application? Explore the spectrum between “streamable” and “queryable” components in real-time applications. You’ll learn to distinguish when to process data in-flight and when to compute results on-demand, and leverage that knowledge to select the right tool for the right job. Drawing on lessons from years of experience contributing to technologies like Apache Kafka, Apache Pinot, and KSQL, this session will cover: A historical perspective on the unique challenges these tools are designed to solve. The pitfalls of applying technology to the wrong problem. Best practices for combining stream processing with real-time querying. Watch to demystify the real-time application stack and gain the confidence to design reliable and scalable systems. LEARN MORE ► Learn about StarTree and Apache Pinot™: https://docs.startree.ai/ CONNECT Subscribe on YouTube: https://stree.ai/sub Community Slack: https://stree.ai/join-slack Twitter:   / startreedata   Linkedin:   / startreedata   GitHub: https://github.com/startreedata Site: https://startree.ai ABOUT STARTREE StarTree, powered by Apache Pinot™, is the platform for continuous insights at scale. StarTree turns raw data streams—like clickstreams, logs, vector embeddings, and sensor data—into real-time analytics. It powers customer-facing data products, agent-facing data products, and operational intelligence. Apache Pinot™ delivers real-time analytics by design, rather than extension—built from the ground up to ingest massive data streams with millisecond freshness, execute sub-second aggregations, and support tens of thousands of queries per second. Pinot achieves this while radically reducing infrastructure costs by scanning less data and extreme compression. StarTree was founded by the core software engineering team and inventors of Apache Pinot™, which currently powers hundreds of user-facing applications at companies across industries, including Uber, LinkedIn, Stripe, Target, 7Eleven, NuBank, Etsy, Walmart, Together AI, and more. #apachepinot #realtimeanalytics #startree