Introduction

ClickHouse is an open source, column-oriented analytics database created by Yandex for OLAP and big data use cases. ClickHouse’s support for real-time query processing makes it suitable for applications that require sub-second analytical results. ClickHouse’s query language is a dialect of SQL that enables powerful declarative querying capabilities while offering familiarity and a smaller learning curve for the end user.

Column-oriented databases store records in blocks grouped by columns instead of rows. By not loading data for columns absent in the query, column-oriented databases spend less time reading data while completing queries. As a result, these databases can compute and return results much faster than traditional row-based systems for certain workloads, such as OLAP.

Online Analytics Processing (OLAP) systems allow for organizing large amounts of data and performing complex queries. They are capable of managing petabytes of data and returning query results quickly. In this way, OLAP is useful for work in areas like data science and business analytics.

In this tutorial, you’ll install the ClickHouse database server and client on your machine. You’ll use the DBMS for typical tasks and optionally enable remote access from another server so that you’ll be able to connect to the database from another machine. Then you’ll test ClickHouse by modeling and querying example website-visit data.

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