Quesma promotes database gateways

Quesma, a young Polish software company, joined the recent IT Press Tour in London, organized in parallel with KubeCon. We first discussed with Quesma during the Boston edition last October when we met Hydrolix as Quesma provides a key core component for their solution. And it gave me ideas to learn more about their solution.

We had the opportunity to meet Jacek Migdal, CEO and founder, for a company and product update. Quesma, founded around the end of 2023, raised $2.5 million and has 8 employees with a deep expertise in structured data, SQL language and database back-ends. And even if many tries have been made to replace SQL, the query language is here to stay as it is so widely used and adopted. But what about the back-end databases that could be replaced with more modern approaches and designs especially in log, traces, events and metrics world.

The team develops a middleware, operating as a database gateway to proxy queries, in other words, applications won't talk directly with back-end databases but rather are connected to Quesma query service layer. The solution has been recognized and adapted by 2 hot players, Hydrolix and ClickHouse. In terms of use case, migration is of course addressed but also database integration without changing anything on the application layer.

The team prepares SQL Pipe Syntax based on the Google paper available here. The idea is to optimize SQL commands and leverage some semantic order alignments.

Quesma product is available on GitHub and the pricing is aligned to the stack used by users. In other words, if the stack is open source, Quesma is free, if not a fee has to be paid at $30/TB/month.