Farewell 2022, Welcome 2023!

2022 is almost over. Santa Claus is decorating his sleigh for the holiday voyage, and people all around the world are preparing to celebrate the advent of a new year. Let’s have a seat and take a quick look back to what Altinity was in 2022, and imagine what we can do in 2023.

As in many recent years, in 2022 Altinity was a leader in the ClickHouse community. We contributed over a hundred PRs to ClickHouse projects, released several Altinity Stable builds, multiple versions of Altinity Kubernetes Operator for ClickHouse, clickhouse-backup utility, the Altnity Grafana plugin for ClickHouse, and the Altinity Tableau Connector for ClickHouse. We organized or co-organized five virtual ClickHouse meetups, two in-person meetups, and hosted the OSA Con — open source analytics conference. We published dozens of technical blog articles and gave many webinars and conference talks. Plus we answered countless questions about ClickHouse on Slack, Telegram, and GitHub. We even heard from many ClickHouse users how they use our webinars as a part of their onboarding process. 

We were happy to see that in 2022 we were not alone anymore. Last year, ClickHouse Inc was established. It changed the market a lot. The ClickHouse team took a new role in marketing ClickHouse, stepping up in meetups, blogs, and webinars. We welcome their efforts! While competing in certain business areas, we keep collaborating on open source projects and in maintaining the community. Our common goal is to make ClickHouse the best analytical database on the planet, and we keep working on that together with all ClickHouse users and contributors.

2022 was also the most exciting year so far for Altinity.Cloud — the first and the best-managed ClickHouse service. We added many new features, tripled our customer base, and quadrupled revenue. The major newcomer was Altinity.Cloud Anywhere. This is a unique product that gives ClickHouse users cloud convenience on data in their own VPCs. Next year, we plan to leverage its capabilities fully in order to extend Altinity.Cloud to Azure, DigitalOcean and other cloud providers.

We keep looking for ways to speed up analytics and provide real-time insights to users. This is why we developed the Altinity Sink Connector for ClickHouse. It allows MySQL users to replicate their data in real-time to ClickHouse, with little operational overhead. See the full story in our blog if you missed it. Next year, we plan to extend it to PostgreSQL and integrate it into Altinity.Cloud. As usual for Altinity software, the Sink Connector is open source.

While 2022 was a year of advances for ClickHouse and Altinity, we cannot forget that there were terrible setbacks as well. COVID-19 has receded somewhat this year, but the war in Ukraine affected the lives of millions of people. This includes the ClickHouse community and colleagues at Altinity. Our colleagues are now safe, but we don’t forget their families and others who are still suffering. We pray for peace to return in 2023. 

In such times it’s important not to fall prey to easy cynicism or destructive hatred. At Altinity we believe the openness and collaboration of open source communities show humanity at its best. We try to model those values within Altinity and all the communities in which we are members. Our world faces many challenges. The only way to solve them is to work together. 

And indeed, we know something about working across nations. Altinity has staff in 15 countries and even more time zones. It’s challenging but also enlightening to work in such a broadly distributed team. After two years of COVID-19 blackouts on travel, we have finally started to meet in person again. There were four meetings in four countries for work and fun. It was great to work together and break bread with our colleagues. 

Altinity is looking forward to 2023. There are a lot of plans, and we are eager to make them happen. Stay tuned! But for now – Happy Holidays and a Happy New Year!