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Comment by winrid | Hacker News Reader

I've been thinking about rebuilding the website analytics service I have, to be around sharded duckdb and just giving people raw SQL access.

ClickHouse is the alternative, but this approach has some interesting advantages, like simplicity.

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I find clickhouse equally simple. One command to install and then you can either read from local/remote files, create tables, etc

From the brief time I used it running signoz it used a surprising amount of resources, which requires further investigation, but yes it's a nice stable option.

Clickhouse looks more complicated because instead of

    create table bla (
      id number,
      xyz varchar
    )

you're doing things like

    create table bla (
      id uint64 CODEC(DoubleDelta(8)),
      xyz Nullable(LowCardinality(Varchar)) CODEC(ZSTD(1))
    )
    engine=MergeTree
    order by id

but I do wonder what is the performance difference between actually carefully specifying everything and leaving defaults (except for order by I guess).

Fair enough. Some of the settings will have performance impact, e.g. the low cardinality type, data skipping indexes, etc. and you have to spend some time to learn and experiment yourself. However it’s a powerful db and even the default settings will work well in the majority of cases.

Just leave everything by default - no need specifying any codecs, etc. People often try to show up their knowledge by using advanced features, but that's not good.

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