ClickHouse
| License | FOSS problems | Maintenance | SSO | Users | Tested |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apache-2.0Permissive license. Like MIT, but each contributor grants users a patent licence covering their contribution, preventing later suits. | — | Active | — | Unlimited | ❌ |
Evaluation
What it is
ClickHouse is a column-oriented database built for fast aggregation over very large datasets — billions of rows scanned quickly — rather than the row-by-row transactional workload Postgres or MySQL are built for. Apache 2.0 licensed, with ClickHouse Inc. selling a managed cloud on top rather than gating the open-source engine itself.
Why it could be useful
A genuinely different shape of problem than the other three: nothing here is meant to hold an application's live state, but log aggregation, metrics, or usage analytics at real volume outmatch what a row-oriented database can do efficiently. If self-hosted analytics or observability tooling — the kind evaluated in Monitoring — ever needs a backing store of its own, this is the shape of tool for it, not another Postgres instance.
Why not to go for it
Nothing in this project currently produces data at a volume that would justify it. Running an OLAP database for a dataset that fits comfortably in Postgres is pure overhead — another service to patch and back up for no real gain. Worth revisiting only if a specific analytics or observability tool genuinely needs it as a backend, not before.