[hodgesrm]

Perhaps your experience is different from mine but JSON string columns are very common in ClickHouse. A common schema idiom is to put the JSON in a string and then selectively materialize commonly queried properties into regular table columns. You can index the column with a bloom filter index to do needle-in-a-haystack searches on the entire row's data. Bloom filters are tricky to parameterize correctly but I have seen this approach used to good effect in very large applications.

[barrkel]

Yeah, I think my exploration of the design space is different to other people who are using CH to e.g. store event data.

If you can eliminate most "rows" with criteria on materialized columns, then the occasional dip into JSON shouldn't be too bad.