OpenObservability Talks ClickHouse: Breaking the Speed Limit for Observability and Analytics - OpenObservability Talks S5E12
The ClickHouse® project is a rising star in observability and analytics, challenging performance conventions with its breakneck speed. This open source OLAP column store, originally developed at Yandex to power their web analytics platform at massive scale, has quickly evolved into one of the hottest open source observability data stores around. Its published performance benchmarks have been the topic of conversation, outperforming many legacy databases and setting a new bar for fast queries over large volumes of data.
Our guest for this episode is Robert Hodges, CEO of Altinity — the second largest contributor to the ClickHouse project. With over 30 years of experience in databases, Robert brings deep insights into how ClickHouse is challenging legacy databases at scale. We’ll also explore Altinity’s just-launched groundbreaking open source project—Project Antalya—which extends ClickHouse with Apache Iceberg shared storage, unlocking dramatic improvements in both performance and cost efficiency. Think 90% reductions in storage costs and 10 to 100x faster queries, all without requiring any changes to your existing applications.
The episode was live-streamed on 20 May 2025 and the video is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VeyTL2JlWp0
You can read the recap post: https://medium.com/p/2004160b2f5e/
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Show Notes:
00:00 - Intro
01:38 - ClickHouse elevator pitch
02:46 - guest intro
04:48 - ClickHouse under the hood
08:15 - SQL and the database evolution path
11:20 - the return of SQL
16:13 - design for speed
17:14 - use cases for ClickHouse
19:18 - ClickHouse ecosystem
22:22 - ClickHouse on Kubernetes
31:45 - know how ClickHouse works inside to get the most out of it
38:59 - ClickHouse for Observability
46:58 - Project Antalya
55:03 - Kubernetes 1.33 release
55:32 - OpenSearch 3.0 release
56:01 - New Permissive License for ML Models Announced by the Linux Foundation
57:08 - Outro
Resources:
ClickHouse on GitHub: https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse
Shopify’s Journey to Planet-Scale Observability: https://medium.com/p/9c0b299a04dd
Project Antalya: https://altinity.com/blog/getting-started-with-altinitys-project-antalya
https://cmtops.dev/posts/building-observability-with-clickhouse/
Kubernetes 1.33 release highlights: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7321054742174924800/
New Permissive License for Machine Learning Models Announced by the Linux Foundation: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:share:7331046183244611584
- Opensearch 3.0 major release: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/horovits_opensearch-activity-7325834736008880128-kCqr
Socials:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/OpenObserv
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@openobservabilitytalks
Dotan Horovits
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X (Twitter): @horovits
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/horovits
Mastodon: @horovits@fosstodon
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Robert Hodges
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LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/berkeleybob2105/