What is ClickHouse?
ClickHouse is an open-source column-oriented database management system (DBMS) developed by the Russian IT company Yandex for online analytical processing (OLAP) queries on big data. It supports SQL and is optimized for fast aggregations of large datasets.
The main features of ClickHouse include:
- Column-oriented storage for efficient encoding and data compression
- Distributed and fault-tolerant architecture that scales horizontally
- Query processing optimized for read speed on big data instead of read-write balancing
- Schema-free design that allows flexible data ingestion from a variety of sources
- SQL support with additional extensions and operators for analytics
- Interconnectivity with popular business analytics tools like Tableau, Power BI, and others
ClickHouse is typically used for handling high volumes of incoming facts and events, real-time analytics, generating aggregations and reports, exploratory data analysis, and more. It is often part of larger big data pipelines. The schema flexibility and fast queries make ClickHouse suited for time-series workloads as well.
Overall, ClickHouse excels at fast aggregations and ad-hoc queries over huge datasets for analytics use cases where write speed is not as critical.