Case Study: UniQode achieves 10x faster queries migrating from Elasticsearch to Apache Pinot on StarTree
Key results
The challenge
UniQode (formerly Beaconstac) ran its QR-code analytics on Elasticsearch, where p95 latencies exceeded 20 seconds, queries frequently timed out, and error rates reached about 15,000 errors in a two-hour window. The cluster sustained only 30-40 QPS where the workload demanded 100+ QPS.
The solution
UniQode migrated to Apache Pinot on StarTree Cloud, a purpose-built real-time analytics database using columnar storage, specialized indexing, and streaming ingestion to serve user-facing dashboards at scale.
The results, in context
Overall query performance improved 10x and p95 latency improved 20x, from over 20 seconds to 0.5-1 second. The migration eliminated query errors entirely, cut cluster nodes by 50% and CPU cores by 10x, reduced memory 7x, and shrank overall infrastructure footprint by 90%, with p99 latency down 90%.