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Comment by hipadev23 | Hacker News Reader

Or just use Clickhouse.

Clickhouse has excellent performance and it scales out indeed. Unfortunately, it's hard to deploy and maintain a Clickhouse cluster and its catalog features are pretty basic compared to Databricks and Snowflake.

I’m sorry what? Clickhouse is crazy easy to deploy. Single node is just a binary. “Cluster” is single binaries on individual nodes plus clickhouse-keeper (the one extra layer of complexity). Altinity and others offer k8s operators or managed solutions to do all this on-prem to make it even easier.

Your data catalog point remains, it doesn’t offer anything other basic SQL describe functionality.

The comparison is with Snowflake and Databricks, which takes a button or a query (https://docs.snowflake.com/en/sql-reference/sql/create-wareh...) to deploy new clusters. No disk, network, or permission setup is needed for each cluster.

I have rarely seen data people familiar with K8s as they mostly use managed services, but feel free to prove me wrong!

I fully disagree with suggesting ridiculously overpriced for-profit SaaS solutions in the context of choosing among open-source tech.

I don't recommend overpriced SaaS solutions; I highlight that there is a lesson to be learned on why they're so popular, and open-source tech could be as simple as them.

That's why I started Universql in the first place; use their interface/protocol as an open-source tech and reduce the compute cost (often ~90% of the total cost of DWHs) by using DuckDB. You still get all the catalog features without paying the premium price.

They are so popular because the decisions are made by managament in many companies and they have a good sales team.

Using popularity as justification of anything is the definition of slippery slope.

I agree but I also don't think you can have $3B ARR with only good sales.

Clickhouse also has managed service (https://clickhouse.com/)

There are in fact multiple cloud services for ClickHouse. Aiven and Altinity also offer them, among others.

Disclaimer: I work at Altinity.

I mean there’s clickhouse cloud then…

Clickhouse is open core. Which is a dealbreaker for me.

in my testing, clickhouse dies on various queries with OOM on large datasets, because algos are subefficient.

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