The Business of Open Source cover image

The Business of Open Source

Friendly Competition within the ClickHouse Ecosystem with Robert Hodges

Sep 18, 2024
Robert Hodges, CEO of Altinity, shares his fascinating journey with ClickHouse, which he didn’t create but embraced when his team needed better scalability. He dives into strategic product decisions, explaining why they chose not to include a certain high-security feature for broader user clarity. The conversation also reveals the friendly competition among multiple companies within the ClickHouse ecosystem, underlining how collaboration can drive open-source innovation while maintaining unique revenue strategies.
42:51

Episode guests

Podcast summary created with Snipd AI

Quick takeaways

  • Altinity's success with ClickHouse demonstrates that the value of open source lies in performance and user experience rather than being free.
  • The collaborative yet competitive environment among companies in the ClickHouse ecosystem fosters innovation and customization while addressing unique user needs.

Deep dives

The Relationship Between Altinity and ClickHouse

Altinity serves as an enterprise service provider for ClickHouse, an open-source data warehouse originally developed by Yandex. The company was founded in 2017 by Alexander Zaitsev and focuses on providing support and solutions for ClickHouse, which gained popularity due to its speed and efficiency in handling large volumes of data. Altinity has significantly contributed to the ClickHouse community, merging over 563 pull requests and maintaining crucial ecosystem projects, such as a Kubernetes operator tailored for deploying ClickHouse clusters. Their evolution from a consulting service to a full-fledged company showcases their commitment to making ClickHouse user-friendly and widely adopted.

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