ClickHouse
Hacker ApprovedRanked 2 of 5 analytical databases by recommenders
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.
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.
156 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 124
- criticize it
- 32
- approval share
- 79%
Recommended in 12 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Owned for 5 years
Median of the 9 owners who said how long they have had it.
Each square is one year.
Why it carries the badge
- 124 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 3.9 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 12 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Very fast analytical queries
“The API is built w/ Go & Clickhouse, which I've also been super impressed with so far in terms of performance and efficiency.”
Comment from 13 Jul 2026 in “Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (July 2026)” “Migrating to Clickhouse took me from constant timeouts on analytics queries to all queries returning in well under 100ms”
Comment from 19 Jun 2026 in “Ten years of ClickHouse in open source” “Column-oriented is fundamentally different, and pairs well with all the SIMD acceleration ClickHouse is also doing.”
Comment from 10 Jul 2026 in “Postgres rewritten in Rust, now passing 100% of the Postgres regression tests” - Comment from 20 Jun 2026 in “Ten years of ClickHouse in open source”
- Comment from 14 Dec 2025 in “Pg_ClickHouse: A Postgres extension for querying ClickHouse”
- Comment from 29 Jul 2026 in “Choose DuckDB rather than SQLite”
Great for logs and observability
“ClickHouse replacing Loki finally made our observability stack feel 'right'. It really is a powerhouse for logs and general analytical queries.”
Comment from 19 Jun 2026 in “Ten years of ClickHouse in open source” “The truth is that Clickhouse is an incredible DB that scales really well for observability data.”
Comment from 13 May 2026 in “Traceway: MIT-licensed observability stack you can self-host in ~90s” “ClickHouse proven being a beast for analytics, tracing and even some basic metrics storage”
Comment from 29 Jul 2026 in “Choose DuckDB rather than SQLite” - Comment from 11 Sep 2026 in “I've operated petabyte-scale ClickHouse clusters for 5 years”
Handles huge data volumes
“Clickhouse consumer goes through 10TB of blobs and ends up having 15GB of postprocessed data in like 5-10 minutes”
Comment from 20 Jan 2026 in “Article by article, how Big Tech shaped the EU's roll-back of digital rights” “From experience, I'd suggest using ClickHouse beyond a few billion rows of timeseries data in Postgres.”
Comment from 28 May 2026 in “Just Use Postgres for Durable Workflows” “especially with ClickHouse it's so much better to handle the large data volume compared to the past”
Comment from 18 Jan 2026 in “Command-line Tools can be 235x Faster than your Hadoop Cluster (2014)” - Comment from 18 Jan 2026 in “Command-line Tools can be 235x Faster than your Hadoop Cluster (2014)”
- Comment from 19 Jun 2026 in “Ten years of ClickHouse in open source”
Efficient S3 and Parquet ingestion
“ClickHouse reads and writes Parquet very efficiently and supports efficient distribution of work across clusters”
Comment from 29 Dec 2025 in “Best way to annotate large parquet LLM logs without full rewrites?” “Clickhouse has better S3 consumer than Redshift. It sucks up those Kinesis files like nothing.”
Comment from 19 Jan 2026 in “Article by article, how Big Tech shaped the EU's roll-back of digital rights” “query on Iceberg is end-to-end faster on ClickHouse than MergeTree native format on disk”
Comment from 3 Aug 2026 in “Andy Pavlo Joins ClickHouse to Establish ClickHouse Labs” - Comment from 20 Jan 2026 in “Article by article, how Big Tech shaped the EU's roll-back of digital rights”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Secondary indexing is awkward
“The benefit of StarRocks/ClickHouse over Trino is that you get secondary indices, but that means you have to do the indexing somehow.”
Comment from 3 Aug 2026 in “Andy Pavlo Joins ClickHouse to Establish ClickHouse Labs” “the problem you run into is when you want to index stuff- secondary indices are tightly coupled to the query engine”
Comment from 11 Sep 2026 in “I've operated petabyte-scale ClickHouse clusters for 5 years” Operational quirks and limitations
“the limitations basically _everyone_ using single instance ClickHouse often run into if they actually have a large dataset”
Comment from 18 Jan 2026 in “Command-line Tools can be 235x Faster than your Hadoop Cluster (2014)” “the lack of a proper resource management of Clickhouse that led to queries failing under pressure”
Comment from 27 Jan 2026 in “Database Benchmarks Lie (If You Let Them)” “it was highly particular, and everyone had their own odd habits built around running it”
Comment from 11 Sep 2026 in “I've operated petabyte-scale ClickHouse clusters for 5 years” - Comment from 13 May 2026 in “Traceway: MIT-licensed observability stack you can self-host in ~90s”
Open-source and security concerns
“Clickhouse is *really* gatekeeping the "zero copy replication" where you store data on object-storage”
Comment from 19 Jun 2026 in “Ten years of ClickHouse in open source” “they're not very clear about how that is what they are, pretending to be open source business instead”
Comment from 19 Jun 2026 in “Ten years of ClickHouse in open source” “There as a actually a vulnerability Clickhouse, which helps you to execute any query on the remote postgresl.”
Comment from 18 Dec 2025 in “Inside PostHog: SSRF, ClickHouse SQL Escape and Default Postgres Creds to RCE” - Comment from 17 Dec 2025 in “Inside PostHog: SSRF, ClickHouse SQL Escape and Default Postgres Creds to RCE”
Other analytical databases people recommend
The four most recommended other analytical databases, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
See all 5 analytical databases, rankedWhat people said
40 of the 202 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“So I definitely recommend them and the whole clickhouse ecosystem in general for any kind of high throughput read and write analytics work.”
“the problem you run into is when you want to index stuff- secondary indices are tightly coupled to the query engine”
“For web analytics and log management ClickHouse is a great replacement for ElasticSearch”
“it was highly particular, and everyone had their own odd habits built around running it”
“It is useful to understand which dependencies, libraries, and template instantiations contribute to the size.”
“I have decided to use clickhouse with that config because of missing S3 for logs and metrics for long term store.”
“Almost always they end up setting up a separate system such as Clickhouse and replicating the data between the two systems.”
“major OSS projects have all/most important data structures and algorithms implemented and described way better”
“query on Iceberg is end-to-end faster on ClickHouse than MergeTree native format on disk”
“The benefit of StarRocks/ClickHouse over Trino is that you get secondary indices, but that means you have to do the indexing somehow.”
“ClickHouse proven being a beast for analytics, tracing and even some basic metrics storage”
“The API is built w/ Go & Clickhouse, which I've also been super impressed with so far in terms of performance and efficiency.”
“Column-oriented is fundamentally different, and pairs well with all the SIMD acceleration ClickHouse is also doing.”
“substantially better performance on the same hardware, even moreso for larger range queries (multiple days)”
“Migrating to Clickhouse took me from constant timeouts on analytics queries to all queries returning in well under 100ms”
“ClickHouse can scale down to compete with duckdb, I dont believe duckdb can scale up like ClickHouse can.”
“they're not very clear about how that is what they are, pretending to be open source business instead”
“The query speed deserves the praise, but the JSON ingestion path has quiet footguns nobody mentions here.”
“Clickhouse is *really* gatekeeping the "zero copy replication" where you store data on object-storage”
“ClickHouse replacing Loki finally made our observability stack feel 'right'. It really is a powerhouse for logs and general analytical queries.”
“I've been using clickhouse for the last year for in-house analytics and found it a really pleasant experience”
“the automatic partition-based TTL is very nice and, at least so far, requires zero attention to maintain”
“From experience, I'd suggest using ClickHouse beyond a few billion rows of timeseries data in Postgres.”
“solves the most painful part of metrics: high cardinality. Has its use-cases, but for sure comes with its own problems”
“The truth is that Clickhouse is an incredible DB that scales really well for observability data.”
“row level access control, resource quotas, scheduling policies, session settings, etc. all could have been used in concert”
“integration with ClickHouse is few weeks of effort for potentially significantly faster performance for analytics”
“the lack of a proper resource management of Clickhouse that led to queries failing under pressure”
“Both Postgres and ClickHouse are designed primarily with developers building their system of record applications.”
“Clickhouse consumer goes through 10TB of blobs and ends up having 15GB of postprocessed data in like 5-10 minutes”
“Clickhouse has better S3 consumer than Redshift. It sucks up those Kinesis files like nothing.”
“When a single server is not enough, you deploy ClickHouse on a cluster, up to thousands of machines”
“the limitations basically _everyone_ using single instance ClickHouse often run into if they actually have a large dataset”
“especially with ClickHouse it's so much better to handle the large data volume compared to the past”
“ClickHouse reads and writes Parquet very efficiently and supports efficient distribution of work across clusters”
“Clickhouse has a fun design. They don't mislead anyone who is interested in the details and their documentation is in the end rather detailed.”
“There as a actually a vulnerability Clickhouse, which helps you to execute any query on the remote postgresl.”
“clickhouse's HTTP interface would normally require user/pass auth and not have access to all privileges”
“certainly a core DB company like ClickHouse should be held accountable for such an oversight”
“ClickHouse is a purpose-built analytical database with thousands of optimizations for analytics”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.