QMiner is an open source analytics platform for performing large scale data analysis written in C++ and exposed via a Javascript API. The paper presents five main design elements which focus on focus on storage, online and real-time processing as well as fast prototyping and give QMiner unique advantages as a data analytics platform for processing streams of structured and unstructured data. These design elements are incorporated in a five layer architecture represented by 1) storage and indexing, 2) stream aggregate, 3) feature extractor, 4) linear algebra and 5) analytics layers. The functionality of the platform is demonstrated by three representative usage examples containing code fragments: text classification, time series prediction and community detection in graphs.