ClickHouse for Devs and GraphQL – December 2020 Meetup Report

ClickHouse virtual meetup [December 2020]

As part of helping to grow the ClickHouse community, we love topics related to analytic app development. This includes talks that help developers to learn about ClickHouse as well as innovative technologies like GraphQL. The December 2 ClickHouse SF Bay Area meetup had both types of content. Here is a summary including links to slides and videos for each. 

  • Your first ClickHouse data warehouse — Robert Hodges from Altinity (video link here). This talk focused on how to get started with ClickHouse as a developer.  There were three main areas: installation, how to get your data into ClickHouse and start running queries, and basic “self-defense” on data warehouses.  The last is important for engineers coming from databases like MySQL, PostgreSQL, or MongoDB. They arrange and access data differently from column-oriented data warehouses. Knowing the basics about how data warehouses work is key to using them productively. 
  • Bitquery GraphQL for Analytics — Aleksey Studnev, CTO of Bitquery (video link here). GraphQL offers users flexible access to data without exposing backend databases. Aleksey’s talk introduced the analytic problem that drove Bitquery to consider GraphQL, demoed use of GraphQL to handle OLAP queries–including a cool viewer they developed–and dug into the underlying Ruby implementation. As part of the code discussion, Aleksey provided links to Bitquery’s activecube and activecube-graphql projects on Github. This is a great starting point for anyone who wants to understand the plumbing of GraphQL and build their own interfaces.

Once again this was a fun meetup with lots of questions, including queries from the YouTube stream viewers. I would like to thank Aleksey for generously sharing Bitquery experiences with GraphQL. Please check them out. We’ve now had a couple of talks about how to share data publicly, including Splitgraph in September.  We plan to return to this topic regularly in future meetups. 

The next ClickHouse SF Bay Area Meetup will be on January 20th and will be our quarterly virtual office hours. It will feature (once again) three of the biggest stars in the ClickHouse firmament: Alexey Milovidov, Alexander Zaitsev, and Denis Zhuravlev, aka Denny_Crane on Telegram.  Alexey will kick things off with a talk about astonishing new ClickHouse features and the 2021 community roadmap.

2020 has been a very up-and-down year across the entire planet. We wish everyone in the ClickHouse community a happy and healthy 2021. Please make a New Year’s resolution to tell the rest of us what you are doing with ClickHouse at a future meetup! 

P.S.: Want to propose ClickHouse meetup talks? Email us at info@altinity.com or send a message over Telegram or Slack.

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