[glogla]

I like a lot of things about Clickhouse but one thing I'm afraid of is what happens when your data won't fit on a single machine. The replication and sharding seems pretty difficult and from reading the documentation feels like it might be pretty fragile.

I think once you reach that scale, systems that completely separate data and compute (like snowflake or trino+s3) are much less of a pain to run since even if you completely blow up your compute the data stays.

> Does anyone have some recommendations on what GUIs I could give our PMs to work with ClickHouse instead of writing queries? All SaaS I found didn't support ClickHouse yet or would cost us a newborn. Also what tools do your devs use when they work with ClickHouse data?

I think both Superset and Metabase were interesting choices - if you want to save money (at the expense of engineering time) you can self-host them.

[hodgesrm]

> I like a lot of things about Clickhouse but one thing I'm afraid of is what happens when your data won't fit on a single machine.

ClickHouse sharding and replication is not that hard to master--it's simple and the parts are visible. If you don't want the headache of distributed system management, run it in Kubernetes or a managed service. ClickHouse-as-a-service is widely available from multiple vendors.

ClickHouse is also fast and cost-efficient at scale. It's a very good fit for multi-tenant SaaS analytics where you need fixed latency on responses to users.

Disclaimer: I work for Altinity, who run a cloud platform for ClickHouse.

[nojito]

Ebay wrote a great blog post about clustering clickhouse

https://tech.ebayinc.com/engineering/ou-online-analytical-pr...

[lk888]

--- The replication and sharding seems pretty difficult and from reading the documentation feels like it might be pretty fragile.

That's why trip.com replaced Clickhouse with StarRocks, a free (open source) OLAP database that handles sharding beautifully to give you linear scalability, and better query performance for single table or joined queries.

[gaploid]

We built a Managed ClickHouse service to help exactly these difficulties with that technology. We are handling sharding, clustering, zookeeper, patching, updates without downtime, and Hybrid storage based on S3. https://double.cloud

[AdamProut]

How many Clickhouse as a service offerings exist now? I stopped counting at 7 a few months ago (double.cloud was not on my list).

[gaploid]

Could you share a list of them?

[AdamProut]

  - Firebolt (Hard fork of clickhouse)
  - Altinity
  - Gigapipe
  - Hydrolix
  - Bytehouse.cloud
  - https://clickhouse.com/ ("coming soon")
  - TiDB (Their columnstore is a fork of clickhouse)

I stopped tracking after this. I saw a few press releases go by announcing a few others as well which I lost now.

The official Clickhouse Inc. is surely going to be under pressure to pull features out of their open source offering over time to differentiate themselves.

[zX41ZdbW]

ClickHouse can run in a classic shared-nothing setup and in "cloud-native" setup with shared storage. Setting up a distributed system with hundreds of machines can be difficult... but it's actually not more difficult than for any other distributed system at this scale.