[pbowyer]

> but every time I try to use it, I get stuck on "how do I get data into it reliably"

That's the same stage I get stuck every time.

I have data emitters (in this example let's say my household IoT devices, feeding a MQTT broker then HomeAssistant).

I have where I want the data to end up (Clickhouse, Database, S3, whatever).

How do I get the data from A to B, so there are no duplicate rows (if the ACK for an upload isn't received when the upload succeeded), no missing rows (the data is retried if an upload fails), and some protection if the local system goes down (data isn't ephemeral)?

The easiest I've found is writing data locally to files (JSON, parquet, whatever), new file every 5 minutes and sync the older files to S3.

But then I'm stuck again. How do I continually load new files from S3 without any repetition or edge cases? And did I really need the intermediate files?

[wiredfool]

Easiest way is to post csv/json/whatever through the http endpoint into a replacing merge tree table.

Duplicates get merged out, and errors can be handles at the http level. (Admittedly, one bad row in a big batch post is a pain, but I don’t see that much)

[Narhem]

HTTP errors aren’t the most readable, although traditional database errors aren’t too readable most of the time.

[wiredfool]

What I meant is that you'll get an HTTP error code from the insert if it didn't work, so that can go through the error handling. This isn't really an "explore this thing", it's a "splat this data in, every minute/file/whatever". I've churned through TBs of CSVs this way, with a small preprocessor to fix some idiosyncratic formatting.

[masterj]

Cloudflare workers combined with their queues product https://developers.cloudflare.com/queues/ might be a cheap and easy way of solving this problem

[maccard]

This is _exactly_ my problem, and where I've found myself.

[zbentley]

This isn't appropriate for all use-cases, but one way to address your and GP's problem is as follows:

1. Aggregate (in-memory or on cheap storage) events in the publisher application into batches.

2. Ship those batches to S3/alike, NFS that clickhouse can read, or equivalent (even a dead-simple HTTP server that just receives file POSTs and writes them to disk, running on storage that clickhouse can reach). The tool you use here needs to be idempotent (retries of failed/timed out uploads don't mangle data), and atomic to readers (partially-received data is never readable).

3. In ClickHouse, run a scheduled refresh of a materialized view pointed at the uploaded data (either "SELECT ... INFILE" for local/NFS files, or "INSERT INTO ... SELECT s3(...)" for an S3/alike): https://clickhouse.com/docs/en/materialized-view/refreshable...

This is only a valid solution given specific constraints; if you don't match these, it may not work for you:

1. You have to be OK with the "experimental" status of refreshable materialized views. My and other users' experience with the feature seems generally positive at this point, and it has been out for awhile.

2. Given your emitter data rates, there must exist a batch size of data which appropriately balances keeping up with uploads to your blob store and the potential of data loss if an emitter crashes before a batch is shipped. If you're sending e.g. financial transaction source-of-record data, then this will not work for you: you really do need a Kafka/alike in that case (if you end up here, consider WarpStream: an extremely affordable and low-infrastructure Kafka clone backed by batching accumulators in front of S3: https://www.warpstream.com/ If their status as a SaaS or recent Confluent acquisition turns you off, fair enough.)

3. Data staleness of up to emitter-flush-interval + worst-case-upload-time + materialized-view-refresh-interval must be acceptable to you.

4. Reliability wise, the staging area for shipped batches (S3, NFS, scratch directory on a clickhouse server) must be sufficiently reliable for your use case, as data will not be replicated by clickhouse while it's staged.

5. All uniqueness/transformations must be things you can express in your materialized view's query + engine settings.

[maccard]

Thanks for the well thought out reply here. I understand the solution you're proposing, but the thing is that it fails at the first hurdle.

> 1. Aggregate (in-memory or on cheap storage) events in the publisher application into batches.

Clickhouse's Tagline on their website is:

> Build real-time data products that scale

Except, the minute we start having to batch data to process it and stage it, we lose the "real time" part. If I'm shipping them to S3 to have clickhouse batch ingest them, I might as well be use Databricks, Snowflake, or just parquet-on-s3.

[zbentley]

All very fair, though I think your issue may be more with the nature of real-time analytics ingestion pipelines in general than with Clickhouse itself.

Even if you could remove all of the operational burden from Kafka or equivalent, hooking it up to Clickhouse is still, at the end of the day, going to commit in batches (of max_insert_block_size, or kafka_max_block_size, or smaller batches polled from the message broker). Even with no consumer lag, that's still going to incur a delay before your data is SELECTable.

Heck, even Kafka publishers usually don't flush (actually send over the network) after every publish by default.

That same tradeoff comes up in Snowflake and Databricks (albeit mitigated when using Continuous Processing, which is experimental and expensive computationally and monetarily). Their ingestion systems are batching as well.

At the end of the day, "real time" means different things to different people, and you'll have to choose between one of several architectures:

- Clients synchronously insert data (which is then immediately visible) into your analytics store. ClickHouse is less good at handling a barrage of single-row INSERTs than other DBs, but none of them are good at this type of workload at even medium scale. Even manually shipping single-update files to S3 gets expensive and slow fast.

- Batch your inserts and accept bounded lag in data visibility. Doesn't matter whether batching is client-side, database-side, or in an intermediate broker/service.

- Ship your data asynchronously via messaging/streaming/batching and force point-in-time queries to wait for some indication that asynchronous data for the requested point in time has arrived. For example, when batching manually you could delay queries until a batch subsequent to the time-of-query has arrived, or when using Kafka you could wait for the system of record's last-committed-kafka-message-id to pass your topic's max ID at the time of query.

[zX41ZdbW]

I insert data into ClickHouse by single records on each page view, and it is alright. The data is selectable at the same second:

    SELECT * FROM website_traffic WHERE time >= now() - INTERVAL 1 SECOND