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=VeyTL2JlWp0You can read the recap post: https://medium.com/p/2004160b2f5e/ OpenObservability Talks episodes are released monthly, on the last Thursday of each month and are available for listening on your favorite podcast app and on YouTube.We live-stream the episodes on Twitch and YouTube Live - tune in to see us live, and chime in with your comments and questions on the live chat.⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@openobservabilitytalks⁠  https://www.twitch.tv/openobservability⁠Show Notes:00:00 - Intro01:38 - ClickHouse elevator pitch02:46 - guest intro04:48 - ClickHouse under the hood08:15 - SQL and the database evolution path 11:20 - the return of SQL16:13 - design for speed 17:14 - use cases for ClickHouse19:18 - ClickHouse ecosystem22:22 - ClickHouse on Kubernetes 31:45 - know how ClickHouse works inside to get the most out of it 38:59 - ClickHouse for Observability46:58 - Project Antalya55:03 - Kubernetes 1.33 release55:32 - OpenSearch 3.0 release56:01 - New Permissive License for ML Models Announced by the Linux Foundation57:08 - OutroResources:ClickHouse on GitHub: https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse Shopify’s Journey to Planet-Scale Observability: https://medium.com/p/9c0b299a04ddProject 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-kCqrSocials:Twitter:⁠ https://twitter.com/OpenObserv⁠YouTube: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/@openobservabilitytalks⁠Dotan Horovits============X (Twitter): @horovitsLinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/horovitsMastodon: @horovits@fosstodonBlueSky: @horovits.bsky.socialRobert Hodges=============LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/berkeleybob2105/