ClickHouse external dictionaries are a “ClickHouse way” to handle multi-dimensional schema. ClickHouse Dictionaries Explained was the very first article in the Altinity blog three years ago. ClickHouse has improved significantly since then, and dictionaries have achieved a new level of utility. In this article, I will explain two new cool ClickHouse features that completely change the way how dictionaries can be used. Change in a good sense, of course.
A common use case in time series applications is to get the measurement value at a given point of time. For example, if there is a stream of measurements, one often needs to query the measurement as of current time or as of the same day yesterday and so on. Financial market data analysis and all sorts of monitoring applications are typical examples.
Databases have different ways to achieve this task and ClickHouse is not an exception here. In fact, ClickHouse offers at least 5 different approaches. In this article, we will review and compare them.
May 21, 2019
One of our customers recently had a problem using CickHouse: the simple workflow of load-analyze-present wasn’t as efficient as they were expecting. The body of the problem was with loading and presenting IPv4 and IPv6 addresses, which are traditionally stored in ClickHouse as UInt32 and FixedString(16) columns. These types have many advantages, like compact footprint and ease of comparing values. But they also have shortcomings that prompted us to seek a better solution.
