What do you like best about the product?

I have had a great experience using SingleStore. It can ingest massive amounts of change events from Kafka and keep up. It ingests this data within 3-5 seconds of update in our main application. Most of the queries we send to SingleStore come back within 5 seconds and work well with highly concurrent (thousands of customers) environments. For providing customer-facing dashboards and reporting, it is really fast and everything I expect. It also has a great ecosystem with its managed service running in AWS, Azure, and GCP, with support for customer-managed keys and other enterprise features we need. It also has cool newer features like database branching and fast JSON queries (it treats JSON like any other columnar data). It is like a really fast version of Snowflake or Databricks. It is easy to get up and going with SingleStore pipelines (no external tools like Kafka Connect or Apache Flink are required since they have SingleStore pipelines), and customer support is great too when I wasn't able to figure it out on my own.

What do you dislike about the product?

It isn't open source, which I prefer. Despite being proprietary, they do make it fairly easy to use their free version on Docker or their managed free forever solution (but quite limited). The sales/procurement process can be a bit onerous too.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Faster ingest and query speed than most competing products. This results in a better user experience for our customers since they are often creating ad-hoc dashboards in our product and expect the experience to be snappy. As they are building new charts, reports, and dashboards, they iterate through different versions and tweak the settings, and each time they do this, they want the queries to come back within a second or two. Then, when they have 5-10 widgets on a dashboard, they expect those to come back within a couple of seconds. This great experience enables us to democratize reporting for our users and are delighted with our work management product.