# ClickHouse 124 Hacker News commenters recommended ClickHouse and 32 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 12 of 13 months; owners who said how long report a median of 5 years (9 owners). It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule. **Verdict:** A fast open-source columnar database for analytics, logs and observability that handles huge data volumes well, though secondary indexing, resource management and operations can be tricky. ## Why people recommend it - Very fast analytical queries (6 comments): "The API is built w/ Go & Clickhouse, which I've also been super impressed with so far in terms of performance and efficiency." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48887923)) "Migrating to Clickhouse took me from constant timeouts on analytics queries to all queries returning in well under 100ms" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48602380)) "Column-oriented is fundamentally different, and pairs well with all the SIMD acceleration ClickHouse is also doing." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48856895)) - Great for logs and observability (4 comments): "ClickHouse replacing Loki finally made our observability stack feel 'right'. It really is a powerhouse for logs and general analytical queries." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48596743)) "The truth is that Clickhouse is an incredible DB that scales really well for observability data." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48128284)) "ClickHouse proven being a beast for analytics, tracing and even some basic metrics storage" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49100170)) - Handles huge data volumes (5 comments): "Clickhouse consumer goes through 10TB of blobs and ends up having 15GB of postprocessed data in like 5-10 minutes" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46689595)) "From experience, I'd suggest using ClickHouse beyond a few billion rows of timeseries data in Postgres." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48316218)) "especially with ClickHouse it's so much better to handle the large data volume compared to the past" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46666905)) - Efficient S3 and Parquet ingestion (4 comments): "ClickHouse reads and writes Parquet very efficiently and supports efficient distribution of work across clusters" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46420837)) "Clickhouse has better S3 consumer than Redshift. It sucks up those Kinesis files like nothing." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46684013)) "query on Iceberg is end-to-end faster on ClickHouse than MergeTree native format on disk" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49162350)) ## What people warn about - Secondary indexing is awkward (2 comments): "The benefit of StarRocks/ClickHouse over Trino is that you get secondary indices, but that means you have to do the indexing somehow." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49160213)) "the problem you run into is when you want to index stuff- secondary indices are tightly coupled to the query engine" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49666844)) - Operational quirks and limitations (4 comments): "the limitations basically _everyone_ using single instance ClickHouse often run into if they actually have a large dataset" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46667042)) "the lack of a proper resource management of Clickhouse that led to queries failing under pressure" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46781722)) "it was highly particular, and everyone had their own odd habits built around running it" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49661081)) - Open-source and security concerns (4 comments): "Clickhouse is *really* gatekeeping the "zero copy replication" where you store data on object-storage" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48596924)) "they're not very clear about how that is what they are, pretending to be open source business instead" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48597937)) "There as a actually a vulnerability Clickhouse, which helps you to execute any query on the remote postgresl." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46312573)) ## Alternatives hackers recommend - [DuckDB](https://hackerapproved.com/p/duckdb.md): 390 recommend - [Trino](https://hackerapproved.com/p/trino.md): 9 recommend - [Exasol](https://hackerapproved.com/p/exasol.md): 8 recommend - [chDB](https://hackerapproved.com/p/chdb.md): 6 recommend ## Cite as Hacker Approved, "ClickHouse", https://hackerapproved.com/p/clickhouse/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).