Altinity Stable ClickHouse 23.3 Has Arrived!
It has been a while since we certified the Altinity Stable ClickHouse 22.8 release. It was delivered together with the Altinity Stable Build for ClickHouse. Since then many good things have happened to ClickHouse. More than 300 contributors from companies all around the world submitted 3000 pull requests with new features and improvements. Unfortunately, some changes affected the stability of new releases. That is why it took us four long months to gain the confidence required to recommend 23.3 for production use and make sure upgrades go smoothly. As of 23.3.8 we are confident in certifying 23.3 as an Altinity Stable release.
We collected detailed release notes for Altinity Stable ClickHouse 23.3 release at the Altinity Documentation Site. There are a lot of new features, but also many things that changed their behaviour, so check them carefully before upgrading.
Changes in Altinity Stable build compared to upstream ClickHouse
Altinity Stable builds for ClickHouse are open source and are based on the upstream LTS versions. Altinity Stable 23.3.8.22 is based on upstream 23.3.8.21-lts, but we have additionally backported two important fixes:
- Fix key condition on duplicate primary keys ClickHouse/ClickHouse#48838 via Altinity/ClickHouse#275
- Do not build sets for skip indexes if they are not used ClickHouse/ClickHouse#48299 via Altinity/ClickHouse#276
The previous list makes it sound as if Altinity has been slacking off lately. Not at all! Most Altinity fixes go directly to upstream rather than the Altinity/ClickHouse fork, so they are included automatically in Altinity Stable builds. Here are just a few of the numerous Altinity PRs that merged between 22.8 and 23.3.
- Add user setting to force select final at query level ClickHouse/ClickHouse#40945
- Fix Date from CSV parsing ClickHouse/ClickHouse#42044
- Increase request_timeout_ms for s3 disks. ClickHouse/ClickHouse#42321
- Added precise decimal multiplication and division ClickHouse/ClickHouse#42438
- Fix LDAP in case of many roles on user ClickHouse/ClickHouse#42461
- Cancel c-ares failed requests and retry on system interrupts to prevent callbacks with dangling references and premature resolution failures ClickHouse/ClickHouse#45629
We’ll have more backports in later versions of Altinity Stable 23.3. Backports tend to pile up over time as users request features be added to 23.3 rather than undertaking a major version upgrade.
Let’s Install!
Linux packages can be found at https://packages.clickhouse.com for upstream builds, and at https://builds.altinity.cloud for Altinity Stable builds.
Docker images for the upstream version should be referenced as clickhouse/clickhouse-server:23.3.8.21.
Altinity Stable Docker images are available on Docker Hub as altinity/clickhouse-server:23.3.8.22.altinitystable.
For more information on installing ClickHouse from either the Altinity Builds or the upstream builds, see the ClickHouse Altinity Stable Release Build Install Guide.
Please contact us at info@altinity.com if you experience any issues with the upgrade.
You don’t have to install today, since this build has a three year maintenance tail. We’ll support it through 14 July 2026.
Parting Words
Altinity Stable Builds depend on the combined work of many hundreds of open source contributors worldwide. Their efforts make ClickHouse the best data warehouse on the planet. We would like to call out the server engineering and QA teams at Altinity as well as the core committers at ClickHouse Inc. for their stewardship of ClickHouse. We hope our work benefits the entire community.
Besides contacting us at info@altinity.com you can also provide feedback by joining our Slack channel or logging issues on the Altinity ClickHouse fork in GitHub. Talk to you soon!
p.s. FIPS-Compatible 23.3 builds will be out in a couple of days.