You are correct that it's apples and oranges. However, a lot of people use whatever technology is familiar and to-hand to solve problems that turns out to be a

You are correct that it's apples and oranges. However, a lot of people use whatever technology is familiar and to-hand to solve problems that turns out to be a bad fit. I am literally in the process of writing up a case study of a customer that used Google Cloud BigTable for analytics until costs and complexity drove them to search for a replacement — for which StarTree was perfect. I'm not calling out Elastic or Google Cloud BigTable per se. For their core features, and their design-for-purpose both are wonderful products. They just weren't designed for real-time OLAP. The same with Postgres. Or MongoDB. It tends to happen that we take what we know and we throw it at whatever the problem-of-the-day happens to be. Over time, we discover design-for-purpose solutions and move appropriate use cases to it.