CrateDB, an open-source distributed SQL database for real-time analysis of machine data that has already been downloaded more than a million times in the past two years has finally announced its finished 1.0 release.

In line with the announcement, Crate.io, the company that develops CrateDB, said it’s opening a new headquarters in San Francisco, in addition to its existing offices in Berlin and in Dornbirn, Austria.

CrateDB differs quite radically from other SQL databases in that it operates as a cluster of containers, with the ability to redistribute data as it changes the size of its clusters. Those abilities make it an ideal database for analyzing machine data on container platforms such as Docker, Kubernetes and Apache Mesos, the company said.

Indeed, Crate.io Chief Executive Christian Lutz said that 75 percent of his company’s customers use CrateDB for managing IoT and machine data. He claims that CrateDB is able to handle up to 7 million insert operations per second, which amounts to 1.5M/sec on a 14-node cluster of servers.

“The general availability of the product and our expansion to San Francisco mark a new phase in our growth, and we look forward to driving further innovation of the platform both internally and by extension through the open source community,” Lutz said in a statement.

CrateDB draws upon Elasticsearch open-source search engine capabilities to orchestrate cluster state, sharding and replication, the company said. Other open-source components include Lucene, Netty and the Presto SQL parser. But rather than trying to compete against traditional SQL databases, Crate.io is pitching the platform as an alternative to NoSQL machine data management systems that draw on technologies like Cassandra, Elasticsearch and Splunk.

The platform can handle the most complex data queries in real-time thanks to its columnar field caches and its distributed query planner, Crate.io officials said. Meanwhile, the distributed SQL query engine also makes it ideal for data operations like aggregations across multiple clusters.

“The growth of machine data and the opportunities that businesses have to capitalize on it are outstripping the ability of their data management infrastructure to act on it,” said Jason Stamper, an analyst in data platforms and analytics at 451 Research. “CrateDB’s power lies in its ability to enable users to collect and analyze vast amounts of data in real-time, using SQL commands they already know.”

With version 1.0, CrateDB now supports a range of new features, including the Postgres wire protocol, sub-queries, schema and metadata discovery, and trigonometric, percentile, and conditional functions.

Juergen Sutterlueti, Head of Energy Segment at Gantner Instruments, a provider of industrial measurement data acquisition and signal conditioning technology, said his company uses CrateDB to take synchronized and decentral measurements from hundreds of thousands of IoT sensors in real-time.

“[We] feed them into a database and extract that data for instant visibility of power, temperature, pressure, speed and torque,” Sutterlueti said. “Based on the real-time aggregated meta-data they make their decisions. CrateDB is the only database that gives us the speed, scalability and ease of use that our teams, customers and applications require.”

CrateDB is available now from Crate.io and the Docker Store, and is open-sourced under the Apache 2.0 license.