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How Altinity Enhances The Value of ClickHouse®

Apr 15, 2025 | Episode

In the realm of big data analytics, ClickHouse® has emerged as a standout database, celebrated for its speed and efficiency. The company has carved a niche among organizations needing real-time insights from massive datasets. Industries like advertising, financial services, and tech companies running SaaS are typical customers.

In this episode of the SMC Journal show, we talk to Robert Hodges – the CEO of Altinity – about how they add value to ClickHouse implementations for enterprise users and the future of this fast growing segment of the industry.

The Origin of ClickHouse

ClickHouse was initially developed by Alexei Milovidov at Yandex in 2009 to address MySQL’s limitations in handling complex analytical queries for their Metrica product. Yandex needed a solution to analyze vast amounts of web traffic data for its search engine and advertising platform, and traditional databases just weren’t cutting it. The team built a column-oriented relational database optimized for analytical processing, and open-sourced it in 2016. This made ClickHouse available to the world, allowing developers and businesses to utilize its powerful capabilities. There is a global community of contributors around the world including companies like Altinity, making sure it continues to evolve over time.

The original goal was to deliver sub-second query performance on petabytes of structured data. The focus on speed and scale is what defines ClickHouse.

What Sets ClickHouse Apart

ClickHouse isn’t just another database—it’s purpose-built for real-time Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) with a few key differentiators that give it an edge:

  • Column-Oriented Architecture: Unlike row-based databases (e.g., PostgreSQL), ClickHouse stores data by columns. This design slashes I/O by reading only the columns needed for a query, boosting performance for aggregations and filters. The fact that columns are compressed further reduces the data size. It’s up to 1000x faster than traditional systems on large datasets.
  • Real-Time Query Speed: ClickHouse leverages vectorized query execution and painstakingly optimize C++ to process billions of rows in seconds. This makes it a great fit for time-sensitive use cases like Observability or marketing campaign analytics.
  • Scalability and Cost Efficiency: ClickHouse scales horizontally across a range of hardware, but without large licensing fees that are common proprietary databases. Its compression shrinks storage needs, which can help to keep costs in check.
  • Time-Series Proficiency: It has native support for time-based data. This means it works well in applications like log analysis or financial tracking, where sequential data is crucial.

These features make ClickHouse different from competitors like Elasticsearch (which is better for unstructured data) or Snowflake (cloud-native, but pricier). It’s not a transactional database. Updates and deletes are slower when used for that. It works better for situations that are read-heavy.

How Altinity Adds Value to ClickHouse

While ClickHouse’s core strengths are already impressive, Altinity can elevate its practical application for businesses. Altinity bridges the gap between raw technology and enterprise-ready solutions. Despite its impressive speed and efficiency, ClickHouse requires careful planning to get the most out of it. Poor configuration can lead to performance bottlenecks or resource exhaustion. Altnity offers their expertise to help users with these complexities and manage large-scale deployments effectively.

Here’s how they enhance ClickHouse’s value:

Managed Service for ClickHouse with Altinity.Cloud

Altinity offers Altinity.Cloud, a fully managed platform for ClickHouse that simplifies deployment across AWS, GCP, Azure, or on-premises environments. This service frees teams from infrastructure management, enabling rapid setup and dynamic scaling. For instance, organizations can launch a cluster in minutes and adjust resources as workloads shift—ideal for those prioritizing data over ops. Altinity’s approach has proven effective; ChartMogul, for example, saw query speeds jump 40% after migrating to Altinity.Cloud, all with seamless uptime.

Expert Support and Optimization

Altinity provides 24/7 support from ClickHouse specialists, addressing everything from query tuning to cluster stability. This expertise is critical for production environments where downtime isn’t an option. Companies like VMware have tapped Altinity to help refine their ClickHouse implementation, and Yotascale has touted their capability to smooth out their scalability challenges. Altinity’s guidance can reduce response times to fix issues significantly.

Stable Builds for Reliability

Through Altinity Stable Builds, businesses get production-ready ClickHouse versions based on Long-Term Support (LTS) releases. These builds undergo rigorous testing to fix bugs overlooked in community editions. Altinity maintains them for up to three years. This reliability is a lifeline for enterprises.

Open-Source Ecosystem Contributions

Altinity is a user of ClickHouse, a major contributor. They have made over 600 pull requests to ClickHouse’s core code repository. They’ve also developed tools like the Altinity Kubernetes Operator and ClickHouse Backup, which streamline deployment and recovery. These additions make ClickHouse more accessible, integrating smoothly with systems like Kafka or Grafana, and bolster its appeal for modern data pipelines.

Why Altinity Matters

ClickHouse powers analytics in verticals like ad tech (LifeStreet), finance (Deutsche Bank), and SaaS (GitLab), where real-time insights from structured data are non-negotiable. Its differentiators—speed, scalability, and columnar efficiency—meet these industries’ demands head-on. Altinity’s role is pivotal here, turning ClickHouse into a turnkey solution. Whether it’s through managed services, expert know-how, or ecosystem enhancements, Altinity ensures ClickHouse isn’t just powerful but practical.

Altinity differentiates itself from competitors through its deep commitment to open source, unparalleled support expertise, and flexibility in deployment options. They are a profitable company built on top of open source software, which is uncommon in today’s market. Redhat stands out as the gold standard for this, but Altinity has also made it work for them.

Looking Into The Future

The exponential growth of data and the convergence of real-time analytics with AI present significant challenges. Robert Hodges emphasized that many organizations now process petabytes of data daily, necessitating robust solutions for storage and analysis. Altinity is addressing these needs through innovations like Project Antalya, an open-source architecture designed to integrate real-time analytics with data lakes organized using formats like Iceberg.

ClickHouse’s journey from a Yandex experiment to a global analytics staple reflects its ability to tackle big data challenges. Its market edge lies in its laser focus on analytical performance, and Altinity’s contributions make it even more robust for real-world use. For organizations eyeing a database that balances cost, speed, and scale, ClickHouse—backed by Altinity—offers a compelling path forward.

Check out this other episode on databases.

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