Apache Pinot is a column-oriented, open-source, distributed data store written in Java.

[9] Pinot was first created at LinkedIn after the engineering staff determined that there were no off the shelf solutions that met the social networking site's requirements like predictable low latency, data freshness in seconds, fault tolerance and scalability.

Pinot was started as an internal project at LinkedIn in 2013 to power a variety of user-facing and business-facing products.

The first analytics product at LinkedIn to use Pinot was a redesign of the social networking site's feature that allows members to see who has viewed their profile in real-time.

Helix is embedded as an agent within the different components and uses Apache ZooKeeper for coordination and maintaining the overall cluster state and health.