How can I try or evaluate QuestDB?

You can try QuestDB directly from its website: the homepage offers a Free Enterprise Trial and a Live Demo as the two primary entry points, alongside an "Enterprise 4.0" section and a set of industry case studies. If your goal is to see whether QuestDB fits a demanding time-series workload, start with the Live Demo for a guided look, and use the Free Enterprise Trial when you want to run your own data through it.

Entry points on questdb.com

The site presents evaluation paths in a few places, all reachable from the main navigation and hero area:

The homepage states the product is "the open-source time-series database for demanding workloads," so an open-source option exists alongside the Enterprise trial — but the page itself only surfaces the trial and demo as explicit calls to action. Treat those two as the confirmed starting points.

What the demo and trial are meant to show

QuestDB's pitch is a single SQL engine spanning messaging, stream processing, and tiered storage, with the live stream and the complete record unified. The published benchmark figures on the page give you concrete numbers to check during evaluation:

• 19M rows/sec/server ingestion
• 220M rows/sec streamed to Arrow
• 2.3s to stream 500M rows
• 32ms for the first Arrow batch

These are QuestDB v10.0 QWP benchmark results as published on the site. Use them as reference points, not guarantees — your own throughput will depend on schema, hardware, and query patterns. The useful evaluation move is to reproduce a slice of your workload and compare.

Evaluation paths by scenario

The site organizes use cases into three industries, each with a stated problem:

Capital markets

"Modernize the market data stack. Never drop a tick." The page describes capturing ticks, orders, executions, and transactions at market speed, then acting on them in real time while keeping the same history queryable for pre-trade signals, research, TCA, risk, P&L, surveillance, and compliance. A three-step flow is given: capture every event once (with durability, deduplication, and out-of-order correction built in), act before the moment passes, then investigate with the full record in SQL and open the same data through Apache Parquet, Iceberg, and Arrow.

Aerospace & robotics

Listed as a served industry, relevant if you ingest high-frequency sensor or telemetry streams.

Energy & infrastructure

Also listed, relevant for continuous operational data from plants and grids.

The page claims QuestDB is "running in banks, exchanges, rockets, and power plants," and cites a national-scale deployment handling 7,000+ queries/second for 90M users. If your workload resembles any of these, the corresponding case study is the fastest way to judge fit.

A practical evaluation sequence

1. Watch the Live Demo to see the ingestion-to-query flow without setup.
2. Start the Free Enterprise Trial and load a representative sample — ideally with out-of-order or duplicate events, since the page specifically claims built-in deduplication and out-of-order correction.
3. Run your real query shapes in standard SQL, including any time-window aggregations you depend on.
4. Check open-format access by exporting or reading the same data through Parquet, Iceberg, or Arrow, which the page presents as a core integration point.
5. Compare against the published benchmarks above, adjusting for your hardware.

What the page does not tell you

Pricing, trial length, signup requirements, and whether login is needed are not specified in the available page content. The only pricing-related signal is the word "upgrade," which suggests a free-to-paid path but does not define terms. Confirm these details on the site itself before planning a budget or timeline.