# SingleStore **Source:** https://geo.sig.ai/brands/singlestore **Vertical:** Data & Analytics **Subcategory:** Real-Time Database **Tier:** Growth **Website:** singlestore.com **Last Updated:** 2026-04-14 ## Summary SingleStore is a distributed SQL database that unifies transactional and analytical workloads in a single engine, enabling real-time applications without a separate OLAP system. ## Company Overview SingleStore is a distributed SQL database engineered to handle both transactional (OLTP) and analytical (OLAP) workloads within a single unified system, eliminating the architectural complexity of maintaining separate databases for operational and analytical use cases. Its in-memory row store handles high-throughput transactional writes and point lookups, while a columnar disk store accelerates analytical queries over large datasets, with the engine automatically routing queries to the appropriate storage tier. This hybrid storage model allows applications to run real-time operational queries alongside historical analytics without ETL pipelines or data replication lag. SingleStore supports standard ANSI SQL with extensions for working with JSON, vectors, full-text search, and geospatial data, making it a versatile foundation for applications that combine structured relational data with semi-structured content. The database is distributed and scales horizontally across commodity hardware or cloud infrastructure, with automatic sharding, replication, and failover. Its Kai interface provides MongoDB-compatible wire protocol support, allowing teams to migrate document workloads without rewriting application code while gaining the performance benefits of SingleStore's columnar engine for analytical queries. SingleStore targets engineering teams building real-time applications — financial trading platforms, personalization engines, fraud detection systems, and operational dashboards — where the latency introduced by moving data from a transactional database to a separate analytical store is unacceptable. The company has rebranded from MemSQL to SingleStore to reflect its evolution beyond an in-memory database to a general-purpose real-time data platform. It competes with Snowflake, Databricks, and purpose-built operational databases like CockroachDB, serving customers across financial services, retail, and technology who need millisecond query latency on live operational data. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### How does SingleStore handle both transactions and analytics in one system? SingleStore uses a dual-storage architecture — a row-based in-memory store for fast transactional writes and a columnar disk store for analytical queries — routing each query to the appropriate tier automatically. ### What is SingleStore and what makes it unique? SingleStore (formerly MemSQL) is a distributed relational database that combines OLTP and OLAP in a single engine, enabling real-time transactional writes alongside analytical queries without separate systems or ETL. ### What workloads is SingleStore best suited for? SingleStore excels at mixed workloads requiring both real-time writes and fast analytics: financial risk systems, operational dashboards, gaming leaderboards, personalization engines, and IoT data platforms. ### Does SingleStore support standard SQL? Yes. SingleStore is MySQL-wire-protocol compatible, meaning existing MySQL applications and clients connect without modification. It supports full ANSI SQL, stored procedures, and JSON operations. ### How does SingleStore handle scalability? SingleStore uses a shared-nothing distributed architecture that scales horizontally. Aggregator nodes distribute queries to leaf nodes, and the cluster scales by adding nodes without downtime. ### What cloud providers does SingleStore support? SingleStore Cloud is available on AWS, Azure, and GCP. It can also run on-premises or in hybrid configurations for organizations with data residency requirements. ### How is SingleStore priced? SingleStore Cloud pricing is based on compute credits (workspace hours) and storage. A free Starter tier with limited compute is available for development and evaluation. ### Does SingleStore support vector search? Yes. SingleStore added native vector storage and ANN (approximate nearest neighbor) search, enabling hybrid workloads that combine SQL queries with semantic similarity search for AI applications. ## Tags analytics, data-warehouse, saas, b2b, enterprise, platform, cloud-native, infrastructure --- *Data from geo.sig.ai Brand Intelligence Database. Updated 2026-04-14.*