Apache Arrow VS ClickHouse

Compare Apache Arrow vs ClickHouse and see what are their differences.

Apache Arrow

Apache Arrow is a multi-language toolbox for accelerated data interchange and in-memory processing (by apache)
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Apache Arrow ClickHouse
75 208
13,480 34,153
2.2% 2.6%
10.0 10.0
6 days ago about 22 hours ago
C++ C++
Apache License 2.0 Apache License 2.0
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.

Apache Arrow

Posts with mentions or reviews of Apache Arrow. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-03-05.
  • How moving from Pandas to Polars made me write better code without writing better code
    2 projects | dev.to | 5 Mar 2024
    In comes Polars: a brand new dataframe library, or how the author Ritchie Vink describes it... a query engine with a dataframe frontend. Polars is built on top of the Arrow memory format and is written in Rust, which is a modern performant and memory-safe systems programming language similar to C/C++.
  • From slow to SIMD: A Go optimization story
    10 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 23 Jan 2024
    I learned yesterday about GoLang's assembler https://go.dev/doc/asm - after browsing how arrow is implemented for different languages (my experience is mainly C/C++) - https://github.com/apache/arrow/tree/main/go/arrow/math - there are bunch of .S ("asm" files) and I'm still not able to comprehend how these work exactly (I guess it'll take more reading) - it seems very peculiar.

    The last time I've used inlined assembly was back in Turbo/Borland Pascal, then bit in Visual Studio (32-bit), until they got disabled. Then did very little gcc with their more strict specification (while the former you had to know how the ABI worked, the latter too - but it was specced out).

    Anyway - I wasn't expecting to find this in "Go" :) But I guess you can always start with .go code then produce assembly (-S) then optimize it, or find/hire someone to do it.

  • Time Series Analysis with Polars
    2 projects | dev.to | 10 Dec 2023
    One is related to the heritage of being built around the NumPy library, which is great for processing numerical data, but becomes an issue as soon as the data is anything else. Pandas 2.0 has started to bring in Arrow, but it's not yet the standard (you have to opt-in and according to the developers it's going to stay that way for the foreseeable future). Also, pandas's Arrow-based features are not yet entirely on par with its NumPy-based features. Polars was built around Arrow from the get go. This makes it very powerful when it comes to exchanging data with other languages and reducing the number of in-memory copying operations, thus leading to better performance.
  • TXR Lisp
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 8 Dec 2023
    IMO a good first step would be to use the txr FFI to write a library for Apache arrow: https://arrow.apache.org/
  • 3D desktop Game Engine scriptable in Python
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 1 Nov 2023
    https://www.reddit.com/r/O3DE/comments/rdvxhx/why_python/ :

    > Python is used for scripting the editor only, not in-game behaviors.

    > For implementing entity behaviors the only out of box ways are C++, ScriptCanvas (visual scripting) or Lua. Python is currently not available for implementing game logic.

    C++, Lua, and Python all implement CFFI (C Foreign Function Interface) for remote function and method calls.

    "Using CFFI for embedding" https://cffi.readthedocs.io/en/latest/embedding.html :

    > You can use CFFI to generate C code which exports the API of your choice to any C application that wants to link with this C code. This API, which you define yourself, ends up as the API of a .so/.dll/.dylib library—or you can statically link it within a larger application.

    Apache Arrow already supports C, C++, Python, Rust, Go and has C GLib support Lua:

    https://github.com/apache/arrow/tree/main/c_glib/example/lua :

    > Arrow Lua example: All example codes use LGI to use Arrow GLib based bindings

    pyarrow.from_numpy_dtype:

  • Show HN: Udsv.js – A faster CSV parser in 5KB (min)
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 4 Sep 2023
  • Interacting with Amazon S3 using AWS Data Wrangler (awswrangler) SDK for Pandas: A Comprehensive Guide
    5 projects | dev.to | 20 Aug 2023
    AWS Data Wrangler is a Python library that simplifies the process of interacting with various AWS services, built on top of some useful data tools and open-source projects such as Pandas, Apache Arrow and Boto3. It offers streamlined functions to connect to, retrieve, transform, and load data from AWS services, with a strong focus on Amazon S3.
  • Cap'n Proto 1.0
    10 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 28 Jul 2023
    Worker should really adopt Apache Arrow, which has a much bigger ecosystem.

    https://github.com/apache/arrow

  • C++ Jobs - Q3 2023
    3 projects | /r/cpp | 4 Jul 2023
    Apache Arrow
  • Wheel fails for pyarrow installation
    1 project | /r/learnpython | 16 Jun 2023
    I am aware of the fact that there are other posts about this issue but none of the ideas to solve it worked for me or sometimes none were found. The issue was discussed in the wheel git hub last December and seems to be solved but then it seems like I'm installing the wrong version? I simply used pip3 install pyarrow, is that wrong?

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;

What are some alternatives?

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

Airflow - Apache Airflow - A platform to programmatically author, schedule, and monitor workflows

loki - Like Prometheus, but for logs.

h5py - HDF5 for Python -- The h5py package is a Pythonic interface to the HDF5 binary data format.

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

Apache Spark - Apache Spark - A unified analytics engine for large-scale data processing

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

FlatBuffers - FlatBuffers: Memory Efficient Serialization Library

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

polars - Dataframes powered by a multithreaded, vectorized query engine, written in Rust

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

beam - Apache Beam is a unified programming model for Batch and Streaming data processing.

datafusion - Apache DataFusion SQL Query Engine