Steal This Knowledge Base
The Solution Was In the Problem
When we created the first version of the Altinity Knowledge Base, we created a site where we could share our ClickHouse knowledge with the ClickHouse community, whether they are an Altinity customer or not. We have the Altinity Documentation Site for our official instructions and guides, and the Knowledge Base to post quick code samples and instructions to solve the most pressing ClickHouse questions and problems.
With the knowledge base, we developed some clear goals:
- Allow Altinity support staff and engineers to quickly post ClickHouse related solutions to common problems, code snippets, SQL queries, and any other information that might help people. It didn’t matter if the reader was an Altinity support customer or just a general ClickHouse user, get the knowledge out there so help people.
- Have this repository of knowledge be easily accessible and quickly updated without a lot of maintenance.
We originally built the system using Gitbook, which let Altinity staff get in, make a change, and publish it. But from the start we had a desire to share this knowledge base with everyone. Not just in a “read only” fashion, but to invite everyone who uses ClickHouse to contribute their knowledge so more people can benefit.
We feel that the more people can use ClickHouse to solve their analytic database problems, the easier they find it to set up on their laptop or in a cluster, and the faster they can get results, the more the ClickHouse community benefits – and we all win.
Good Artists Copy; Great Artists Steal
So we went back to the drawing board, and we are proud to announce our updated Altinity Knowledge Base. Still at https://kb.Altinity.com, all of the articles with the same URLs are still available, now hosted on GitHub Pages using Hugo and the Docsy theme. Everything that we add to this knowledge base is licensed Apache 2.0, so you can take whatever you need and put it into your own code.
By migrating to Hugo with the Docsy theme, it let us invite the ClickHouse community to participate in the knowledge base. Now they can do more than read the knowledge base – everyone can submit an edit or add a new article through GitHub as a pull request through the following process:
- From https://kb.Altinity.com, either select Edit this page (to update an existing page) or Create child page (to create a new one under a topic heading).
- Using Markdown, write whatever you like. GitHub provides a nice Markdown preview tab so you can double check how it looks.
- Save it as a new fork, and submit it via a pull request. We’ll ask that you agree to our Content License Agreement(CLA) before we can accept it. The CLA asks that whatever you submit, you agree that you’re authorized to give it to us and we can use it in the knowledge base as we need to.
- We’ll review it, and add it to the knowledge base under the Apache 2.0 license so everyone can use it and spread it.
Our goals are to keep expanding this knowledge base with Altinity support engineers and developers, ClickHouse community members, and people who want to find common solutions to their problems. It might be a more optimized way of setting up a cluster, or some clever code that makes the already fast ClickHouse even faster.
Whatever it is, we’re committed to keeping it under the Apache 2.0 license and giving it away. The more we share and give away to each other about how to use ClickHouse, tune it, wrest every drop of analytic performance out of it, the more all of us in the ClickHouse community benefit.
Welcome to the new Altinity Knowledge Base. We look forward to you learning how ClickHouse can work for you, and seeing what ideas you have to share with the world.