[brancz]

Great question!

The big one that existing columnar databases can’t do (or not well), is the ability to search and aggregate on user defined dimensions (think prometheus-style labels). Influx 3.0 is the only other columnar database that is (now) available that was engineered specifically to be able to do this. The good folks at honeycomb came to the same conclusion that this type of columnar database (wide column) is necessary to build Observability with exceptional user experience. Plus we now own our future and can do any kind of optimization while other companies (and I’ve spoken to them) constantly fear ClickHouse relicensing or otherwise destroying their business.

//edit: we call this feature dynamic columns: https://github.com/polarsignals/frostdb#dynamic-columns