Data Visualization and JSON: October SF ClickHouse Bay Area Meetup

Time flies! The 27 October SF ClickHouse Meetup had three new talks on the themes of data visualization and JSON processing. The videos have been up for a while so here’s a quick summary as well as links in case you would like to watch them. 

First up was a short talk from Joaquin Colacci on Streaminy: Improving real-time visualization. Streaminy is a new service that creates graphs on real-time data that you can then share with other users. Joaquin provided a quick overview and described the integration with ClickHouse. It’s great to see this kind of tooling emerge, since real-time response is at the heart of many Clickhouse applications. 

Next, Lorenzo Mangani of QXIP presented CLoki: Like Loki but for ClickHouse! Loki is a powerful log aggregation application from Grafana, which leads to an obvious question. Can we store the data in ClickHouse?? That’s exactly what CLoki does. It implements Loki APIs over a ClickHouse backend. Users get the visualization and query of Grafana Loki combined with the speed of ClickHouse. CLoki is on Github so you can try it yourself after watching the video, which includes a great demo. (I was pretty much sold after seeing it.) 

Last up was your humble correspondent presenting Better Than You Think: Handling JSON Data in ClickHouse. JSON is now pervasive as a representation of data that feed real-time systems in use cases from financial analysis to network telemetry. My talk covered the many ways ClickHouse offers to represent and query JSON data. It includes tricks for getting JSON into ClickHouse quickly, handling variable structures, and building efficient pipelines with materialized views. We’ve learned them by helping and observing hundreds of applications. 

I would like to thank our presenters for their excellent talks along with the audience who viewed the talk on Zoom as well as YouTube. As usual, there were many great questions. You can see the whole meetup from the YouTube livestream here. 

2021 is slowly coming to an end but ClickHouse meetups are not yet finished. The final meetup of the year is scheduled for Wednesday 15 December 2021. Have a cool project that integrates with ClickHouse? Have a great app you built on top of it? Just want to share your experience with others in the ClickHouse community? We’re building the agenda now and welcome new presentations. Give us a shout at info@altinity.com.  See you in December!