Wadata
Wadata is a lightweight, column-oriented database format that emerged in the early 2020s as an alternative to traditional row-based relational databases. Designed primarily for analytical workloads, Wadata stores data in a way that minimizes disk I/O while maintaining compatibility with SQL-compatible query engines. The format was first introduced by the open‑source project Wadata Analytics, led by a team of data engineers at a university research lab. The initial release, version 1.0, was made available on GitHub under an MIT license and quickly gained attention for its ability to compress large datasets to less than a tenth of their original size without sacrificing query speed.
Key technical features include vectorized storage of each column, optional app‑side compression using LZ4, and a
By late 2024, Wadata had been adopted by several startups focused on log analytics and by a