So Quickwit is primarily a search engine and thus relies on an inverted index. We also implemented our schemaless columnar storage optimized for object storage.

The inverted index and columnar storage are part of tantivy [0], which is the fastest OSS search library out there (except for the academic project pisa) [1]. We maintain it, and we decided to build the distributed engine on top of it.

[0] tantivy github repo: https://github.com/quickwit-oss/tantivy

[1] tantivy bench https://tantivy-search.github.io/bench/