More Proof, If Needed, That ClickHouse Is Going to Be Big

Today’s announcement of ClickHouse, Inc., is a long-expected event in the history of ClickHouse®. In case you have not read the news, a team including Alexey Milovidov, original creator and lead committer, has founded a new VC-funded start-up devoted to building the next analytics mega-business around ClickHouse. 

At Altinity we have just one word to say: Welcome!

As the pioneering enterprise ClickHouse provider in the US and Europe since 2017, our biggest challenge has been name recognition for ClickHouse itself. The injection of $50M in Series A funding will go a long way to solving this problem. ClickHouse is one step closer to becoming the default database for analytic applications worldwide. We are also delighted to see Alexey’s post commenting on the importance of open source development

Along with outstanding speed and efficiency, open source is a core reason for ClickHouse popularity. This is so for two reasons. 

First, permissive Apache 2.0 licensing means that ClickHouse can be used for any business purpose. Early adopters like CloudFlare and LifeStreet, where our CTO Alexander Zaitsev first encountered ClickHouse, built innovative SaaS analytics offering near-real time insight on rapidly arriving digital data. Since then, thousands of businesses have taken advantage of the flexible licensing to run ClickHouse in everything from embedded applications to huge clusters for multi-tenant services. 

Second, an inclusive open source community, led by Alexey, has enabled ClickHouse capabilities to advance at an almost unparalleled rate of speed. Features like SQL projections (KuaiShou), Kafka Table Engine (Cloudflare), TTL moves for tiered storage (Altinity), and many others reflect code contributions from hundreds of contributors worldwide. The resulting innovation on ClickHouse has brought enormous benefits to users. 

Some people may feel that having a VC-backed ClickHouse company might eventually lead to controversial changes like the relicensing seen in other open source projects. The risk seems low. The ClickHouse community is simply too large for any one vendor to dominate. So far in 2021 at least 280 unique GitHub users contributed a merged PR to ClickHouse. In a few short years ClickHouse has grown to hundreds of such contributors annually. It is now one of the most successful database projects ever hosted on GitHub. 

Besides contributors there are already at least 7 cloud services based on ClickHouse not including new services from ClickHouse, Inc. There will be more in future. This is great news for all users, who will be assured of competitive offerings. It’s also interesting that many cloud service vendors participate actively in ClickHouse upstream development. We do the same and look forward to collaborating with all of them to make ClickHouse better. There will be many win-wins as ClickHouse grows. 

If you have been on the fence about using ClickHouse, now is a great time to jump in. Altinity offers all services necessary to help developers create and operate innovative analytic apps. Our training program gets your team up to speed quickly. Our support services help you design and operate applications. Our Altinity.Cloud managed database service takes care of running ClickHouse for you in the public cloud. We’re ready to help, today. 

Go ClickHouse and go open source! 

P.s., Our warm congratulations to Alexey and the ClickHouse core development team. Your success is well-deserved!

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