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What is ClickHouse?

I just completed the Real-time Analytics with ClickHouse: Level 1 Module 1: Introduction to ClickHouse (link) and I want to share my notes here.

What is ClickHouse?

ClickHouse is Clickstream data wareHouse -> ClickHouse. It’s a database management system for OLAP (Online Analytical Processing) workloads.

Some of the key features of ClickHouse are:

  • Column-oriented
  • Designed for fast ingestion (often millions of rows per second)
  • Designed for fast query execution. Typically 1,000 times faster than an OLTP database

Use cases

  • Real-time analytics
  • Data warehousing
  • ML and Gen AI
  • Observability and monitoring (ClickStack)

How to run ClickHouse locally

If you want to run ClickHouse locally, you can use the following command to download the clickhouse binary:

curl https://clickhouse.com/ | sh

To start the server, you can use the following command:

./clickhouse server

Then you can access the ClickHouse HTTP interface at http://localhost:8123 by default.

ClickHouse localhost landing page

Or you can use ClickHouse Cloud to use the server without installing it locally.