ClickHouse

ClickHouse is a column-oriented database company whose engine began as a research project in 2009 and was released as open source in 2016; the business was incorporated in the San Francisco Bay Area, United States, in 2021 to meet demand for sub-second analytical queries over very large, fast-growing datasets.

ClickHouse Cloud runs the open-source engine as a managed service on AWS, GCP and Azure, pairing columnar storage with vectorized query execution and heavy compression so SQL reports return in real time from petabyte-scale tables; it ships with over 100 integrations for ingestion and BI tools and is used by engineering teams at companies such as Spotify, Cisco and GitLab for observability, product analytics and AI workloads.

1. Columnar storage: data is stored by column to accelerate scans on wide analytical tables.

2. Vectorized execution: queries process data in batches per CPU instruction for high throughput.

3. Real-time ingestion: streaming and batch data can be queried immediately after loading.

4. Managed cloud service: ClickHouse Cloud handles scaling, backups and upgrades on major clouds.

5. Broad integrations: over 100 connectors link ingestion pipelines and BI tools to the database.

6. Compression engine: advanced codecs reduce storage footprint for large historical datasets.