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.
https://tech.ebayinc.com/engineering/ou-online-analytical-pr...
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.
- Firebolt (Hard fork of clickhouse)
- Altinity
- Gigapipe
- Hydrolix
- Bytehouse.cloud
- https://clickhouse.com/ ("coming soon")
- TiDB (Their columnstore is a fork of clickhouse)
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.
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.