Plugins

Starting from the 0.3.X release, Pinot supports a plug-and-play architecture. This means that starting from version 0.3.0, Pinot can be easily extended to support new tools, like streaming services, storage systems, input formats, and metrics providers.

Plugins are collected in folders, based on their purpose. Pinot organizes its plugins into eleven plugin families, each targeting a specific extensibility need. The table below summarizes every family, its SPI module, and the implementations that ship with Pinot.

Plugin Families at a Glance

Plugin Family	SPI Interface / Module	Built-in Implementations
Input Format	RecordReader / StreamMessageDecoder	Avro, CSV, JSON, ORC, Parquet, Thrift, Protobuf, Arrow, CLP-Log, Confluent Avro, Confluent JSON, Confluent Protobuf
Filesystem	PinotFS	S3, GCS, HDFS, ADLS
Stream Ingestion	StreamConsumerFactory	Kafka 3.0, Kafka 4.0, Kinesis, Pulsar
Batch Ingestion	IngestionJobRunner	Standalone, Hadoop, Spark 3
Metrics	PinotMetricsFactory	Dropwizard, Yammer, Compound
Segment Writer	SegmentWriter	File-based
Segment Uploader	SegmentUploader	Default
Minion Tasks	PinotTaskGenerator / PinotTaskExecutor	MergeRollup, Purge, RealtimeToOfflineSegments, SegmentGenerationAndPush, UpsertCompaction, UpsertCompactMerge, RefreshSegment
Environment	PinotEnv	Azure
Time Series Language	TimeSeriesLogicalPlanner	M3QL
OpChain Converter	OpChainConverter	Default

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Input Format

Input format plugins read data from files or streams during data ingestion. Batch ingestion uses RecordReader implementations, while real-time ingestion uses StreamMessageDecoder implementations.

Supported Data Formats

Filesystem

Filesystem plugins provide a storage abstraction layer so that Pinot segments can be stored on and fetched from different storage backends.

File Systems

Stream Ingestion

Stream ingestion plugins allow Pinot to consume data from real-time streaming platforms.

https://github.com/pinot-contrib/pinot-docs/blob/latest/manage-data/data-import/pinot-stream-ingestion/README.md

Batch Ingestion

Batch ingestion plugins run data ingestion jobs on different execution frameworks.

https://github.com/pinot-contrib/pinot-docs/blob/latest/manage-data/data-import/batch-ingestion/README.md

Metrics

Metrics plugins control which metrics library Pinot uses to collect and expose internal metrics via JMX. Pinot ships with Dropwizard (default), Yammer, and a Compound implementation that can fan out to multiple registries simultaneously.

Metrics Plugin

Segment Writer

The Segment Writer plugin provides an API for programmatically collecting GenericRow records and building Pinot segments without going through a full batch ingestion job. The built-in file-based implementation buffers rows as Avro records on local disk.

Segment Writer Plugin

Segment Uploader

The Segment Uploader plugin handles uploading completed segment tar files to the Pinot cluster. The default implementation supports all push modes configured via batchConfigMaps in the table config.

Segment Uploader Plugin

Minion Tasks

Minion task plugins define background processing tasks that run on Pinot Minion nodes. Built-in tasks include segment merge/rollup, purge, real-time to offline conversion, upsert compaction, and more.

Minion

Environment

Environment plugins allow Pinot to integrate with cloud-specific features and configurations. The Azure environment plugin provides Azure-specific functionality.

Time Series Language

Time series language plugins allow Pinot to support custom time series query languages like PromQL or M3QL.

Time Series Language Plugin

OpChain Converter

OpChain Converter plugins provide custom implementations for converting logical query plans into executable OpChain objects in the multi-stage query engine. This enables alternative execution backends and plan-to-execution strategies.

https://github.com/pinot-contrib/pinot-docs/blob/latest/developers/plugin-architecture/write-custom-plugins/opchain-converter-plugin.md

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Developing Plugins

Plugins can be developed with no restriction. There are some standards that have to be followed, though. The plugin has to implement the interfaces from pinot-spi.

Write Custom Plugins