Why is ClickHouse better than PostgreSQL for Real-time Analytics?

Introduction

ClickHouse is a column-oriented database management system that is designed for real-time analytics, and it has several features that make it well-suited for this type of workload, compared to PostgreSQL

Comparing ClickHouse with PostgreSQL for real-time analytics

  1. Performance: ClickHouse is optimized for high-performance analytical queries, and it can handle large amounts of data and high query loads. Its column-based storage allows for efficient compression and fast query execution, which can be especially beneficial for real-time analytics.
  2. Scalability: ClickHouse is horizontally scalable, meaning that it can handle a large number of concurrent queries and users without a significant drop in performance. It also supports distributed queries and data replication, which allows for high availability and fault tolerance.
  3. Data modeling: ClickHouse supports a wide range of data types, including arrays, nested data structures, and JSON. This makes it easier to model complex data sets and perform nested queries.
  4. Real-time data ingestion: ClickHouse supports real-time data ingestion and can handle large write loads, which is useful for real-time analytics. It also supports different data loading methods like bulk load, Kafka and real-time streaming.
  5. Memory Management: ClickHouse is optimized for in-memory operations. Data is compressed and stored in memory, which allows for faster read and write operations.
  6. Cost-effective: ClickHouse is designed to work on commodity hardware and can handle large amounts of data with minimal hardware requirements. This makes it a cost-effective solution for real-time analytics.

Conclusion

While PostgreSQL is a powerful and versatile database management system, it may not be as well-suited for real-time analytics workloads as ClickHouse. Depending on the specific use case, ClickHouse may offer better performance, scalability, and data modeling capabilities for real-time analytics.

To know more about PostgreSQL / MySQL in the context of ClickHouse, do consider reading the following article:

About Shiv Iyer 218 Articles
Open Source Database Systems Engineer with a deep understanding of Optimizer Internals, Performance Engineering, Scalability and Data SRE. Shiv currently is the Founder, Investor, Board Member and CEO of multiple Database Systems Infrastructure Operations companies in the Transaction Processing Computing and ColumnStores ecosystem. He is also a frequent speaker in open source software conferences globally.