Why Clickhouse is the Next Database you Should Explore

Using an open-source OLAP database to run analytic queries on your data in sub-second

This post is originally published in my personal blog.

Previously, the Online analytical processing (OLAP) databases were only available as proprietary software offerings like Greenplum, Vertica, Teradata, Paraccel, etc. At that time, it’s very costly to deploy the OLAP databases, and only companies with huge budgets have access to them. Small organizations won’t get a chance to use OLAP databases. Well, things have changed now.

What is Clickhouse

Clickhouse is a fast open-source column-oriented OLAP database management system developed by Yandex for its Yandex.Metrica web analytics service, similar to Google Analytics. It’s built to handle trillions of rows and petabytes of data in mind and perform analytical queries at speed.

Update Sep 2021: Clickhouse Inc spun out of Yandex and recently received $50M Series A funding led by Index Ventures and Benchmark with participation by Yandex N.V. and others.

Clickhouse and OLAP databases are generally used to answer business questions like “How many people visited www.fadhil-blog.dev yesterday coming from Malaysia and using Google Chrome browser?”. The traditional Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) database would take minutes or even hours to process such a query, depending on the dataset size…