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Comment by MentallyRetired | Hacker News Reader

Some unsolicited feedback:

1) I had no idea what Clickhouse was for the first 30 seconds looking at the homepage. I now understand it to be a database of some sort. I shouldn't have seen the words "performance" and "cloud" and "serverless" before seeing the word database, right? I'm starting off confused. There shouldn't be an assumption that I know what you all do.

2) I have no idea what a column oriented database is. I've been a developer for 29 years (mostly frontend but I do a lot of full stack too). If I need an explainer, a lot of devs will.

Aside from that, it looks like a nice offering and I wish you all the best!

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"column oriented database"

We all have our specialties, and that is fine. It is a common pattern that a developer gets comfortable with a particular tech stack, and then uses it for many years without seeing the need for much else. Some developers use Ruby on Rails plus Postgres for everything, others use C# and .NET and SQL Server. It's fine, if that's all you need.

Still, this is the year 2022. Cassandra, to take one example, was released in 2008. For everyone who has needed these fast-read databases, they've been much discussed for 14 years, including here on Hacker News, and on every other tech forum. At this point I think a company can simply assume that most developers will have some idea what a column database is.

You never explained what a column database is. One row and unlimited columns?

https://www.google.com/search?q=columnar+database

Cassandra is not a columnar database, columnar in this sense is about the storage layout. Values for a column are laid next to each other in storage, thus allowing for optimizations in compression and computation, at the expense of reconstructing entire rows. Postgres is a row store, meaning all the columns for a row are stored next to each other in storage, which makes sense if you need all of the values for a row (or the vast majority).

If you don't know what a column oriented DB is, that page is probably not for you.

I know what a column oriented DB is, but ClickHouse was not on my radar before.

The pitch on the landing page is that ClickHouse Cloud is great if you love ClickHouse. If you don't know what ClickHouse is, you have to do some work to find out.

Care to elaborate? I’m a fullstack Rails dev for 12 years and I had no idea either, just like OP. Why alienate potential users from the get go?

Isn't it just a database in Second normal form (2NF)?

No. Column oriented storage db’s make it fast to read 10s to billions of “rows”, usually when you have data that you want to read that can be independent of other columns. Ex: (stock close) - row storage isn’t going to buy you much here, you’d rather read the whole “stock close” column as fast as possible.

Whereas traditional db’s, data like [first name, last name], the columns may have way less meaning on their own and you need both columns to have the data make sense.

A traditional db with B(-)tree storage is much slower when dealing with that type of usage. Storing (stock close) in a single column format makes that type of query much faster.

Column oriented database really isn’t esoteric knowledgeable. You should check out DDIA, especially if you’re doing full stack

Thanks for the well wishes!

And thanks for the honest feedback.

It's always an interesting balance of promoting a new thing (Cloud) and explaining an existing thing. This might be helpful.

https://clickhouse.com/docs/en/home

(note: I work at ClickHouse)

And https://clickhouse.com/docs/en/intro/ is a bit lower level.

That's fine. You probably never played a data warehouse. No big deal, we all have our own areas mastered and gaps elsewhere.

Columnar DBs have been around since 1969, predate relational DBs. Seriously, if you're not into large scale data, it really isn't for you.

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