Why ClickHouse?

ClickHouse is a popular open-source column-oriented database that is known for its speed and scalability. It has gained significant popularity as a database platform, especially in the realm of analytics and big data processing. It has garnered attention for its exceptional performance in handling high-volume, real-time data analytics workloads. ClickHouse's columnar storage architecture, data compression techniques, and efficient query execution make it well-suited for use cases involving large-scale data analysis. It is used by a wide range of organizations, including Uber, Cisco, and CERN.

Many companies and organizations have adopted ClickHouse for their analytical needs, particularly in industries such as finance, telecommunications, e-commerce, and cybersecurity. It has become a go-to choice for businesses dealing with vast amounts of data and requiring fast query performance. I first came across Clickhouse at DNSFilter.

ClickHouse's open-source nature has also contributed to its popularity, as it allows for customization, community contributions, and the development of various integrations. The platform continues to evolve, with ongoing improvements, updates, and expansions to its functionality and ecosystem. Its open source nature allows companies to install and begin prototyping quickly.

While it may not have the same level of mainstream recognition as some other popular databases, ClickHouse has gained a solid reputation within the analytics and big data domains, earning the trust of numerous organizations seeking powerful and scalable data processing capabilities. According to the DB-Engines Ranking, ClickHouse is currently ranked as the 25th most popular RDBMS and 40th overall. This ranking is based on a number of factors, including the number of active users, the number of GitHub stars, and the number of blog posts and articles about ClickHouse. DB-Engines also notes that ClickHouse can be used as a time series DB; however, it does not provide a ranking for that purpose.

ClickHouse is particularly popular for online analytical processing (OLAP) workloads. This is because ClickHouse is able to process large amounts of data very quickly. For example, ClickHouse can process up to 100 million rows per second. It achieves high performance by utilizing a columnar storage model, efficient data compression techniques, and parallel query execution, enabling fast analytical queries and aggregations on large volumes of data.

Another reason for ClickHouse's popularity is its scalability. It can be scaled horizontally by adding more servers to increase capacity. This makes it ideal for organizations that need to process large amounts of data. It is highly scalable due to its distributed architecture, which allows it to handle massive amounts of data by partitioning and replicating data across multiple nodes, enabling horizontal scalability and efficient parallel processing of queries.

ClickHouse has an active development community. The project is maintained by Yandex, and the development team actively contributes to its evolution. The codebase is open-source and hosted on GitHub, allowing developers from around the world to collaborate, contribute code, report issues, and propose enhancements. The development community is responsive and welcomes community contributions in the form of bug fixes, optimizations, new features, and documentation improvements. It might be a challange finding examples of your specific use case, but the community is continually growing.

ClickHouse has a growing and supportive user community. Users can seek help from the typical open source channels. ClickHouse has a dedicated mailing list where users can ask questions, discuss topics, and seek guidance from other users and community members. Many questions related to ClickHouse are asked and answered on Stack Overflow. The community actively monitors and responds to ClickHouse-related queries. There are also active ClickHouse communities on Slack and Telegram, where users can interact, ask questions, and exchange knowledge. The official ClickHouse website hosts community forums where users can engage in discussions, share experiences, and seek help.

In short, ClickHouse is a popular database platform that is known for its speed, scalability, and flexibility. It is a good choice for organizations that need to process large amounts of data quickly.