Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by hbarka | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

hbarka

> We're built on Clickhouse (instead of Postgres), so most queries are orders of magnitude faster.

Woah woah dems fightin words. Is this true?

View on HN

Yes, quite true

https://www.timescale.com/blog/what-is-clickhouse-how-does-i...

  Results of query benchmarking between TimescaleDB [built on PostgreSQL] and ClickHouse. TimescaleDB outperforms in almost every query category

I don’t think that post says what you think it says ;-)

(Disclaimer, Timescale co-founder)

Sorry, wrong link:

https://tech.marksblogg.com/benchmarks.html

As I understand, the comparison doesn’t make sense. ClickHouse is an OLAP db, PG is an OLTP system. I haven’t used ClickHouse, but it seems it’s the kind of thing to back reporting functions, data science workloads etc, not back a transactional website load?

It makes sense in the context that many people use Dune (the product mentioned in this article) for crypto analytics and Dune uses Postgres.

postgres isn't known for being fast, quite the opposite

if your usecase is one clickhouse can handle (timeseries/olap) most queries are orders of magnitude faster.

Time-series queries are faster on TimescaleDB (built on PostgreSQL) than ClickHouse.

https://www.timescale.com/blog/what-is-clickhouse-how-does-i...

Disclaimer: Timescale co-founder

clickhouse is more generally olap and not suitable for oltp, you could call it an olap+timeseries solution similarly to how you position timescale as oltp+timeseries (not all olap solutions support timeseries well but clickhouse does, though their actual positioning is modest: https://clickhouse.com/docs/en/faq/use-cases/time-series)

how much of timescale's performance would you say is inherited from PostgreSQL?

    clickhouse is more generally olap and not suitable for oltp, you could call it an olap+timeseries solution similarly to how you position timescale as oltp+timeseries

You are correct, TimescaleDB is time-series + OLTP. But I would argue that ClickHouse is just OLAP, but is better at time-series than other OLAP. But maybe now I am splitting hairs (and my apologies if I am).

   how much of timescale's performance would you say is inherited from PostgreSQL?

The performance areas where TimescaleDB shines is mostly stuff we have built. But the reliability, tooling, and ecosystem are mostly inherited from Postgres (which I think is a very good thing)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com