In this lesson we will:
- Introduce ClickHouse.
- Explain it's history.
- Exaplain the most appropriate use cases for ClickHouse.
What Is ClickHouse?
ClickHouse is an open source, relational, OLAP Data Warehouse.
It was originally developed as an internal project by Yandex, a Russian search engine, to power an internal platform called Metrica. It was then released as open source in 2016, and became sponsored by a commercial entity ClickHouse Inc in 2021.
ClickHouse is known for and focuses on providing very high performance. This includes the ability to query very large datasets with rapid response, but also rapid ingestion such that new data can be incorporated into queries quickly. This also implies good compression and the ability to serve a large nukber of concurrent online users.
Though ClickHouse does fit into the data warehousing category, it is perhaps best suited and more commonly found in situations where we have high volumes of low level time oriented "event" data and a requirement to analyse this data with very high performance.
Example use cases with this type of data include IOT, clickstream data, log files or real time market data. These are situations where we have huge volumes of raw data which we would like to ingest rapidly and at scale, and analyse in near real-time.