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Comment by datalopers | Hacker News Reader

They would have saved a whole lot of time just using Clickhouse which is a US company and has completely severed ties with Russia [1]. Altinity has offered managed clickhouse since 2020 [2], and now Clickhouse Cloud does too [3]

[1] https://clickhouse.com/blog/we-stand-with-ukraine

[2] https://altinity.com/cloud-database/

[3] https://clickhouse.com/cloud

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If you're really confident that your SaaS application will only have that single workload (single table group-by) into perpetuity, it's a workable choice. But, that's a big bet against the reality of the diverse workloads required today in scale-up SaaS applications. Sure, you can stitch together specialized stores to make your own accidental distributed database for your app, but the simpler, more straight-forward and lower-latency alternative available. Yes, I'm a SingleStore employee, but it is worth considering the argument on its merit. It's also worth trying for free in production. The free tier for production is not time-bound, just capacity-bound.

You should probably focus on evangelizing the features of your own database instead of broadcasting your ignorance on those of a competitor.

> Sure, you can stitch together specialized stores to make your own accidental distributed database for your app, but the simpler, more straight-forward and lower-latency alternative available.

Organizations like Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Cloudflare, and many, many others have been combining specialized data stores for many years. Stonebraker, Madden, and colleagues summarized the argument for this approach in 2007. [0] At this point I can't think of any major SaaS application I've seen recently that did not have multiple data store types. That includes event streams, which are data stores as well.

[0] http://nms.csail.mit.edu/~stavros/pubs/hstore.pdf

Disclaimer: I work for Altinity.

So, you think that the 99.99% of businesses around the world who are not in the cloud hyperscaler business should all build their systems as if they had the engineering resources of cloud hyperscalers? I've seen first-hand how enterprises with Web 2.0 envy made costly, multi-year mistakes in technology choices and architecture with that approach. Be inspired by the engineering prowess of FB, AWS, Netflix, etc., for sure, but don't make the mistake of taking the approach of a $470B (AWS) or $86B (FB) company directly when your company's situation is nothing like that. Stated another way, you can't coach exactly like Pep Guardiola if you don't have his resources and his players. Existing enterprises have a totally different starting point. Enterprises simply can't follow the hyperscaler hegemony for their digital transformation strategies and expect to win. Also, think about who is served by building inefficient, accidental distributed databases underneath your SaaS applications when that can be avoided by using a proven technology alternative already exists. It's the CSPs you're paying in the monthly cloud bill for every byte stored, every byte computed and every byte moved.

MySQL, ClickHouse, and Kafka are all proven technologies. You can run them yourself or choose any of a number of excellent cloud services to run them for you. It's not that hard to combine them and let each part serve the purpose for which it is designed. I've seen companies from small startups to organizations the size of Facebook take this approach. It's a reasonable architecture with many thousands of successful examples.

My own company is not especially large, but we run MySQL, ClickHouse, and Prometheus to manage our own SaaS platform for ClickHouse. We are happy with the result. (Though it would be nice to use ClickHouse as a Prometheus backend.)

> it would be nice to use ClickHouse as a Prometheus backend

Well... that's already possible and it works great! As you might know https://qryn.dev turns ClickHouse into a powerful Prometheus *remote_write* backend and the GO/cloud version supports full PromQL queries off ClickHouse transparently (the JS/Node version transpiles to LogQL instead) and from a performance point of view its well on par with Prometheus, Mimir and Victoriametrics in our internal benchmarks (including Clickhouse as part of the resource set) with millions of inserts/s and broad client compatibility. Same for Logs (LogQL) and Traces (Tempo)

Disclaimer: I work on qryn

Yandex (Google of Russia) is a large share holder of Clickhouse Inc[1]. Yes, this maybe a European Yandex subsidiary.. I really don't care to dig, but I think its dishonest to say the company doesn't have Russian backers. Has Clickhouse Inc forced Yandex to divest their large ownership stake?

[1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/clickhouse/company_f...

> I really don't care to dig

Then why are you opining on the subject?

Because half truths like your statements bother me? Yandex is a large investor in clickhouse Inc. (at last as far as public record shows). Have they forced Yandex to divest their holdings?

It's literally in the article I linked (https://clickhouse.com/blog/we-stand-with-ukraine). As you're incapable of reading let me highlight it for you:

> We have no operations in Russia, no Russian investors, and no Russian members of our Board of Directors.

It's disappointing after 11+ yrs of failing to find traction for MemSQL, this is the hill you die on? You're running your mouth on some random comments thread about a shitty 2-person analytics platform where the author clearly doesn't know the first thing about databases and just went with the first Twitter ad he came across.

Under Raj's "leadership" you know damn well MemSQL/SingleStore will be dead within two years. The hyper-aggressive sales pressure had some success during the lofty bull market due to clueless IT managers with massive budgets, but that time has come to an end. You guys missed the window to IPO to get your own exit and your runway is quickly diminishing.

I read the article. And yes, this was probably a mistake to engage with you on it.

Yandex N.V. (A dutch holding company of Yandex Russia) is listed as an investor of Clickhouse Inc. This is all I'm stating.

This article makes a lot more sense when you know that Singlestore/MemSQL gifted Jack Ellis shares.

Hah. What a joke. So it's all astroturfing and fake evangelism.

Lmao. Hey, if I wasn't running Fathom, Dev Rel @ SingleStore is the only role I'd consider in tech right now. And I would definitely try to get some of those sweet shares as part of compensation. Alas, I don't own any SingleStore shares.

By migrating to SingleStore, we didn’t have to change any persistence logic (we were already using SQL and Laravel Eloquent). Having explored doing that for Elasticsearch, it wasn’t something we wanted to do.

Looking back, I’m glad we went in this direction. Fathom has grown beyond what we could’ve imagined. Let’s see what happens over the next five years.

Clickhouse is a great technology for a niche scenario. A lack of a good QO is one big thing missing but not the only one unfortunately.

I know a company that forked Clickhouse but had to rebuild virtually everything to be a proper database.

There are already plenty of technologies, more mature than Clickhouse for addressing such scenarios.

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