ClickHouse VS RocksDB

Compare ClickHouse vs RocksDB and see what are their differences.

RocksDB

A library that provides an embeddable, persistent key-value store for fast storage. (by facebook)
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ClickHouse RocksDB
208 43
34,153 27,389
2.3% 1.2%
10.0 9.8
about 15 hours ago about 12 hours ago
C++ C++
Apache License 2.0 GNU General Public License v3.0 only
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

ClickHouse

Posts with mentions or reviews of ClickHouse. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-03-24.
  • We Built a 19 PiB Logging Platform with ClickHouse and Saved Millions
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 2 Apr 2024
    Yes, we are working on it! :) Taking some of the learnings from current experimental JSON Object datatype, we are now working on what will become the production-ready implementation. Details here: https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse/issues/54864

    Variant datatype is already available as experimental in 24.1, Dynamic datatype is WIP (PR almost ready), and JSON datatype is next up. Check out the latest comment on that issue with how the Dynamic datatype will work: https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse/issues/54864#issuec...

  • Build time is a collective responsibility
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 24 Mar 2024
    In our repository, I've set up a few hard limits: each translation unit cannot spend more than a certain amount of memory for compilation and a certain amount of CPU time, and the compiled binary has to be not larger than a certain size.

    When these limits are reached, the CI stops working, and we have to remove the bloat: https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse/issues/61121

    Although these limits are too generous as of today: for example, the maximum CPU time to compile a translation unit is set to 1000 seconds, and the memory limit is 5 GB, which is ridiculously high.

  • Fair Benchmarking Considered Difficult (2018) [pdf]
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 10 Mar 2024
    I have a project dedicated to this topic: https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickBench

    It is important to explain the limitations of a benchmark, provide a methodology, and make it reproducible. It also has to be simple enough, otherwise it will not be realistic to include a large number of participants.

    I'm also collecting all database benchmarks I could find: https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse/issues/22398

  • How to choose the right type of database
    15 projects | dev.to | 28 Feb 2024
    ClickHouse: A fast open-source column-oriented database management system. ClickHouse is designed for real-time analytics on large datasets and excels in high-speed data insertion and querying, making it ideal for real-time monitoring and reporting.
  • Writing UDF for Clickhouse using Golang
    2 projects | dev.to | 27 Feb 2024
    Today we're going to create an UDF (User-defined Function) in Golang that can be run inside Clickhouse query, this function will parse uuid v1 and return timestamp of it since Clickhouse doesn't have this function for now. Inspired from the python version with TabSeparated delimiter (since it's easiest to parse), UDF in Clickhouse will read line by line (each row is each line, and each text separated with tab is each column/cell value):
  • The 2024 Web Hosting Report
    37 projects | dev.to | 20 Feb 2024
    For the third, examples here might be analytics plugins in specialized databases like Clickhouse, data-transformations in places like your ETL pipeline using Airflow or Fivetran, or special integrations in your authentication workflow with Auth0 hooks and rules.
  • Choosing Between a Streaming Database and a Stream Processing Framework in Python
    10 projects | dev.to | 10 Feb 2024
    Online analytical processing (OLAP) databases like Apache Druid, Apache Pinot, and ClickHouse shine in addressing user-initiated analytical queries. You might write a query to analyze historical data to find the most-clicked products over the past month efficiently using OLAP databases. When contrasting with streaming databases, they may not be optimized for incremental computation, leading to challenges in maintaining the freshness of results. The query in the streaming database focuses on recent data, making it suitable for continuous monitoring. Using streaming databases, you can run queries like finding the top 10 sold products where the “top 10 product list” might change in real-time.
  • Proton, a fast and lightweight alternative to Apache Flink
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 30 Jan 2024
    Proton is a lightweight streaming processing "add-on" for ClickHouse, and we are making these delta parts as standalone as possible. Meanwhile contributing back to the ClickHouse community can also help a lot.

    Please check this PR from the proton team: https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse/pull/54870

  • 1 billion rows challenge in PostgreSQL and ClickHouse
    1 project | dev.to | 18 Jan 2024
    curl https://clickhouse.com/ | sh
  • We Executed a Critical Supply Chain Attack on PyTorch
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 14 Jan 2024
    But I continue to find garbage in some of our CI scripts.

    Here is an example: https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse/pull/58794/files

    The right way is to:

    - always pin versions of all packages;

RocksDB

Posts with mentions or reviews of RocksDB. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-02-28.
  • How to choose the right type of database
    15 projects | dev.to | 28 Feb 2024
    RocksDB: A high-performance embedded database optimized for multi-core CPUs and fast storage like SSDs. Its use of a log-structured merge-tree (LSM tree) makes it suitable for applications requiring high throughput and efficient storage, such as streaming data processing.
  • Fast persistent recoverable log and key-value store
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 24 Feb 2024
    [RocksDB](https://rocksdb.org/) isn’t a distributed storage system, fwiw. It’s an embedded KV engine similar to LevelDB, LMDB, or really sqlite (though that’s full SQL, not just KV)
  • The Hallucinated Rows Incident
    2 projects | dev.to | 23 Nov 2023
    To output the top 3 rocks, our engine has to first store all the rocks in some sorted way. To do this, we of course picked RocksDB, an embedded lexicographically sorted key-value store, which acts as the sorting operation's persistent state. In our RocksDB state, the diffs are keyed by the value of weight, and since RocksDB is sorted, our stored diffs are automatically sorted by their weight.
  • In-memory vs. disk-based databases: Why do you need a larger than memory architecture?
    3 projects | dev.to | 5 Sep 2023
    The in-memory version of Memgraph uses Delta storage to support multi-version concurrency control (MVCC). However, for larger-than-memory storage, we decided to use the Optimistic Concurrency Control Protocol (OCC) since we assumed conflicts would rarely happen, and we could make use of RocksDB’s transactions without dealing with the custom layer of complexity like in the case of Delta storage.
  • Local file non relational database with filter by value
    1 project | /r/Database | 17 Jun 2023
    I was looking at https://github.com/facebook/rocksdb/ but it seems to not allow queries by value, as my last requirmenet.
  • Rocksdb over network
    1 project | /r/programming | 20 May 2023
  • How RocksDB Works
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 19 Apr 2023
    Tuning RocksDB well is a very very hard challenge, and one that I am happy to not do day to day anymore. RocksDB is very powerful but it comes with other very sharp edges. Compaction is one of those, and all answers are likely workload dependent.

    If you are worried about write amplification then leveled compactions are sub-optimal. I would try the universal compaction.

    - https://github.com/facebook/rocksdb/wiki/Universal-Compactio...

  • What are the advantages of using Rust to develop KV databases?
    2 projects | /r/rust | 22 Mar 2023
    It's fairly challenging to write a KV database, and takes several years of development to get the balance right between performance and reliability and avoiding data loss. Maybe read through the documentation for RocksDB https://github.com/facebook/rocksdb/wiki/RocksDB-Overview and watch the video on why it was developed and that may give you an impression of what is involved.
  • We’re the Meilisearch team! To celebrate v1.0 of our open-source search engine, Ask us Anything!
    14 projects | /r/rust | 8 Feb 2023
    LMDB is much more sain in the sense that it supports real ACID transactions instead of savepoints for RocksDB. The latter is heavy and consumes a lot more memory for a lot less read throughput. However, RocksDB has a much better parallel and concurrent write story, where you can merge entries with merge functions and therefore write from multiple CPUs.
  • Google's OSS-Fuzz expands fuzz-reward program to $30000
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 2 Feb 2023
    https://github.com/facebook/rocksdb/issues?q=is%3Aissue+clic...

    Here are some bugs in JeMalloc:

What are some alternatives?

When comparing ClickHouse and RocksDB you can also consider the following projects:

loki - Like Prometheus, but for logs.

LevelDB - LevelDB is a fast key-value storage library written at Google that provides an ordered mapping from string keys to string values.

duckdb - DuckDB is an in-process SQL OLAP Database Management System

LMDB - Read-only mirror of official repo on openldap.org. Issues and pull requests here are ignored. Use OpenLDAP ITS for issues.

Trino - Official repository of Trino, the distributed SQL query engine for big data, formerly known as PrestoSQL (https://trino.io)

SQLite - Unofficial git mirror of SQLite sources (see link for build instructions)

VictoriaMetrics - VictoriaMetrics: fast, cost-effective monitoring solution and time series database

sled - the champagne of beta embedded databases

TimescaleDB - An open-source time-series SQL database optimized for fast ingest and complex queries. Packaged as a PostgreSQL extension.

TileDB - The Universal Storage Engine

datafusion - Apache DataFusion SQL Query Engine

libmdbx - One of the fastest embeddable key-value ACID database without WAL. libmdbx surpasses the legendary LMDB in terms of reliability, features and performance.