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Comment by singhrac | Hacker News Reader

I'm pretty interested in running Clickhouse, but to poll the room: is it easy to run without an infra person maintaining it? We don't need any kind of persistence guarantee or backups, happy to tear it down every day and refresh the data from sources, but does it have complicated config? How well does it work on say, a single core?

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I've been running clickhouse for production as a solo dev for a year now and it's been great so far. I've had to tune it a bit for the machines I have, but everything works and it's incredibly fast. Not even comparable to postgres. For analytics, it goes way beyond what you'd expect, even under heavy writing.

Even join-heavy queries work great.

If you can run MySQL you can run ClickHouse. They are both about the same level of effort operationally. Your case sounds pretty simple and can be addressed with one or more single node systems.

As far as whether it works on a single core, you probably need to load data and test. That's the only way to answer that question for sure.

IMO the real question for any database is whether you can invest the time to learn how to fix problems and deal with boring but necessary operations like upgrade. If not, it's probably better to use a managed service. We operate a SaaS for ClickHouse but use managed MySQL and Kubernetes. That choice freed up resources to focus on making ClickHouse run well.

Disclaimer: I work for Altinity.

I've been running it in a container on docker swarm (on a celeron 3205U—2x1.5GHz cores). My CH container stores read only data, and I periodically update the snapshot, which involves deploying a newer image. This is very straightforward but, because it's read only, I don't even need a persistent volume.

I've found the documentation to be pretty good and there's a really active telegram group where devs offer help (if you get noticed, but that's not too hard).

Much, much simpler than a lot of dbs I've worked at. It's mostly fire and forget, easily doable without an infra person, imo.

Easy for one person, you just set it and forget about it, I've one 4-core dedicated server for clickhouse that is inserting around 100 million new rows a day, db size is tens of terabytes, works without problems.

Another voice to say it's really easy on a single node. I ran it for a lot of work purely because of this.

If you don't really care about the data then I'd say it's probably pretty easy to run without an infra person right? If you hit a problem just nuke it and try again?

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