Yes I've seen that also work, it's a lot of stitching together things yourself and we had to put a lot of caching in front of the inverted index we were using, however definitely plausible. ClickHouse doesn't do any streaming of data between nodes as you scale up and down which was a big thing for us since we had large datasets and needed to rebalance when cluster expanded/shrunk.

With regards to trie vs inverted index for Graphite data, I'd actually still be inclined to say inverted index is better based on the amount of queries I saw at Uber with Graphite where people did `servers.*.disk.bytes-used` type queries which is way faster to do using an inverted index since you have a postings list for each part of the dot-separated metric name, rather than traversing a trie with thousands to tens of thousands of entries in index 1 host part of the Graphite name. This is what M3DB does[0].

[0]: https://github.com/m3db/m3/blob/b2f5b55e8313eb48f023e08f6d53...