ClickHouse raises $350M Series C

Yep. Clickhouse is absolutely great for tons of production use cases.

Unless you try to join tables in it, in which case it will immediately explode.

More seriously, it's a columnar data store, not a relational database. It'll definitely pretend to be "postgres but faster", but that's a very thin and very leaky facade. You want to do massively a complex set of selects and conditional sums over one table with 3b rows and tb of data? You'll get a result in tens of seconds without optimization. You want to join two tables that postgres could handle easily? You'll OOM a machine with TB of memory.

So: good for very specific use cases. If you have those usecases, it's great! If you don't, use something else. Many large companies have those use cases.

Yes (via Clickhouse Cloud, which is pretty reasonably priced).

It’s important to structure your tables and queries in a way that aligns with the ordering keys, in order to optimize how much data needs to be loaded into RAM. You absolutely CANNOT just replicate your existing postgres DB and its primary keys or whatever over to CH. There are tricks like projections and incremental materialized views that can help to get the appropriate “lenses” for your queries. We use incremental MVs to, for example, continuously aggregate all-time stats about tens of billions of records. In general, for CH, space is cheap and RAM is expensive, so it’s better to duplicate a table’s data with a different ordering key than to make an inefficient query.

As long as the queries align with the ordering keys, it is insanely fast and able to enable analytics queries for truly massive amounts of data. We’ve been very impressed.

It's used in production by many thousands of companies at this point. The ClickHouse Inc numbers are just a fraction of the total users.

p.s., It's also possible to break ClickHouse as you demonstrated. It used to be a lot easier.

I find Clickhouse fascinating, really good, and also really tough to run. It's a non-linear memory hog. It probably needs 32GB RAM for basics to run, otherwise it will OOM on minimal amount of data. That said, it won't "OOM", as in crash. It will just report the query would use too much memory, so it aborted the query.

Heard from the grapevine that CloudFlare uses it for their analytics.

Yes for relatively large workloads

It’s fantastic but it’s a columnar store. It’s not a Postgres replacement.

7 years, 24/7 high volume, self hosted, no issues really.

When Postgres takes a while to answer analytical questions like "what's the 75th percentile of response time for these 900 some billion requests rows, grouped by device, network, and date for the past 30 days", that's when you might want to try out ClickHouse

Clickhouse has a wide range of really interesting technologies that are not in Postgres; fundamentally, it's not an OLTP database like Postgres but more-so aimed at OLAP workloads. I really appreciate Clickhouse's focus on performance and quite a bit of work goes into optimizing the memory allocation and operations among different data types.

The heart of Clickhouse are these table engines (they don't exist in Postgres) https://clickhouse.com/docs/engines/table-engines . The primary column (or columns) is ordered in some way and adjacent values in memory are from the same column in the table. Index entries span wide areas (EG: By default there's only one key record in the primary index for every 8192 rows) because most operations in Clickhouse are aggregate in nature. Inserts are also expected to be in bulk (They are initially a new physical part that is later merged into the main table structure). A single DELETE is an ALTER TABLE operation in the MergeTree engine. :)

This structure allows it to literally crunch billions of values per second (brutally, not with pre-processing, erm, "tricks" although there is a lot of support for that in Clickhouse as well). I've had tables with hundreds of columns and 100+ billion rows that are nearly as performant as a million row table if I can structure the query to work with the table's physical ordering.

Clickhouse recommends not using nullable fields because of the performance implications (it requires storing a bit somewhere for each value). That's how much they care about perf and how close to the raw data type it is that their memory allocation uses. :)

Its a db company that offers an open source database and cloud managed services.

The database is OLAP where Postgres is an OLTP database. Essentially it very fast at complex queries, and is targeted at analytics workloads.

SQL, OLAP, Primary use case is fast aggregations on append only data, like usage analytics.

It's fast, it's........ really fast!!

But you need to get comfortable with their extended SQL dialect that forces you to think a little different than with usual SQL if you want to keep perf high.

It's an alternative to Postgres in the sense that they're both databases. Read up on OLAP vs. OLTP to see the difference.

I guess you could say it's an alternative to postgres. It's a different database, that's column oriented which makes different tradeoffs. I'd say DuckDB is a better comparison, if you're familiar with it.

It's not like Postgres at all, except on the very superficial level. It is an analytical engine like BigQuery, Snowflake, Teradata, etc...

It's quite easy to host your own instance, we've done it ~7 years ago and had a cluster of over 50 nodes without any major issues. What ClickHouse Cloud offers is "shared nothing" storage, via SharedMergeTree that has S3 as a backing store, and it allows to scale storage and compute separately. The implementation is closed source.

It's not that hard, but there are a few pitfalls you can stumble into. I currently run three clusters for myself and have set some for clients in the past.

Some of the default config options are weird and SSL is something that needs to be addressed. Overall, still one of the easier DBs to maintain.

I'm wondering why ClickHouse need to raise more money? Aren't they profitable already?

I've worked at a number of companies using Clickhouse and they all self-hosted. I imagine Clickhouse corporate is focused on large customers.

My understanding is that those 2,000 represent some very large and enterprise-y contracts. The GitHub itself has almost 2,000 contributors: https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse

the ACV for a data warehouse is orders of magnitude beyond $200. Snowflake's ACV is something like $300k/yr

we use smallest cluster and it's $450/month, most companies probably pay much more.

Being a profitable database vendor is really, really hard. You absolutely have to lock down big customers during your hype cycle or you're done for. The time to value for customers is so long, it becomes such an investment and sales cycles become really laborious (as a former DB SE in the past).

I personally see ClickHouse still improving in terms of overall usability and becoming much more polished, introducing features like full-text indexing, JSON data type, etc, all open-source and completely free. The commercial offering deviates from the "bare-bones", "build-it-yourself" storage, but, again, in my opinion it makes perfect sense to commercialise this part of it, to allow the product overall to continue to evolve and be successful. Otherwise ClickHouse as an open-source database probably wouldn't be able to evolve so quickly since the needs of Yandex don't always align with the needs of other users of the database

> Also that's Series D-E, money isn't real anymore

Could you explain this? Is this commentary on voting power dilution or their class a/b share rules?

What differences from original mission do you see ?

Depends on trajectory and capital need among other things. There are series B this size.

I'm really confused by the wrinkle pattern. Were they stored with half the shirt stuffed in a Pringles can? Or were these shot out of a air-cannon? The more I look at the picture the deeper the mystery gets.

so like iron? is it that important? asking legitimately