July 2026 newsletter

ClickHouse's 26.6 release introduces hypothetical skip indexes, AI embedding functions, and experimental continuous queries. Visa's Rafeeq Abdul used ClickHouse Cloud with conversational analytics to reclaim 8-10 hours per user weekly and surface millions in at-risk revenue. The company also announced its first virtual hackathon with Trigger.dev, offering EUR 10,000 in prizes for AI agent chat experiences.

We're well into the summer in the Northern hemisphere, but the content keeps on coming Highlights from the 26.6 release include hypothetical skip indexes, AI embedding functions, and experimental support for continuous queries. Charity Majors explains why ClickHouse is winning the observability wars, on the benchmarking front, Tom Schreiber puts Snowflake Interactive Tables head-to-head with ClickHouse Cloud, measuring cost and performance across the full pipeline, and if you're wrangling lots of small queries, Sanil Upadhyay has a guide to tuning ClickHouse for exactly that. And don’t miss our first-ever virtual hackathon, from July 17-23. Featured community member: Rafeeq Abdul This month's featured community member is Rafeeq Abdul, Senior Director of Engineering for the Authorize.net payments solution at Visa. Rafeeq's team manages $250 million in annual revenue across 2 million authorization events, but until recently, getting an answer out of that data meant waiting 2-3 days for a specialized SQL engineer to write a report. He led the move to conversational analytics, pairing ClickHouse Cloud with the open-source LibreChat interface and the ClickHouse MCP server so non-technical staff can now ask questions like "show revenue risk by merchant segment" in natural language. This solution helped surface millions in at-risk revenue and has reclaimed 8-10 hours per user each week. Rafeeq shared the story https://clickhouse.com/blog/visa-conversational-agents at ClickHouse's 2026 Open House user conference in San Francisco. ➡️ Connect with Rafeeq on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/rafeeqabdul/ Virtual Summer Hackathon: July 17-23 We're running our first-ever virtual hackathon, and you should apply The ClickHouse & Trigger.dev Virtual Summer Hackathon runs July 17 - 23. Build a production-quality AI agent chat experience using ClickHouse and Trigger.dev, compete for a share of EUR 10,000 in prizes, and get your work in front of a panel of 15+ judges, including ClickHouse founder Alexey Milovidov. Open to professional developers across NAMER and EMEA. Solo or teams up to 5. Applications close July 16. ➡️ Apply now https://luma.com/clickh-uko4 26.6 release My favorite feature from the 26.6 release is hypothetical skip indexes, which let you see whether adding a skip index to a table would improve query performance without actually building it. This release also cleaned up how dependencies work for refreshable materialized views, so that we have proper cascading refreshable materialized views. There’s also experimental support for continuous queries and AI embedding functions, a PNG output format, documentation built into the CLI, and Geospatial improvements. Have you heard? ClickHouse is winning the observability wars Charity Majors, Co-founder and CTO of observability company Honeycomb, argues that ClickHouse's columnar architecture, not lower price, is why post-2019 observability vendors can keep scaling past the point where three-pillar tools become "unmanageable." She quotes Mat Duggan https://matduggan.com/clickhouse-is-winning-the-observability-wars/ on the core idea: "ClickHouse at 10 TB a day looks like ClickHouse at 1 TB a day, just with more shards." At 10 TB/day, Duggan's numbers show ClickHouse costing over 35x less than Datadog. He notes that most companies at this scale go hybrid: Datadog for APM and metrics, plus a self-hosted stack often ClickHouse itself for logs, plus a "pre-processing pipeline team" whose only job is trimming data to cut the Datadog bill. What frustrates Charity is that vendors built on that same columnar core hide the architecture and market themselves as cheap Datadog clones instead of owning why they're actually better. The end-to-end cost-performance of real-time analytics: Snowflake vs. ClickHouse Cloud Tom Schreiber, Mark Needham, and Lionel Palacin use CostBench to compare ClickHouse Cloud against Snowflake's Interactive Tables. CostBench is an end-to-end benchmark that measures the true cost of real-time analytics across continuous ingestion, data maintenance, freshness, and query execution rather than query speed alone. Running the full path over 28 hours, ClickHouse delivered better cost-performance, while Snowflake required a continuously running refresh warehouse to keep its pre-aggregated data up to date. We don't copy our Postgres tables to ClickHouse. We replay them. Sushant Yadav wires up Postgres→ClickHouse change-data-capture from off-the-shelf parts: Debezium decoding the WAL, Kafka carrying the row changes, and a ReplacingMergeTree sink keeping the latest version per key. He then covers two challenges they encountered: silently-cached schemas on the sink and a replication slot that can fill the disk and freeze every database on the instance. This blog gives a clear look at CDC on top of Postgres logical replication, which is the same foundation PeerDB / ClickPipes for Postgres CDC https://clickhouse.com/cloud/clickpipes/postgres-cdc builds on, minus the Debezium-and-Kafka assembly you'd otherwise manage yourself. chDB as the Agent's Local Data Engine An AI agent runs as a loop of 5–20 tool calls per turn, and a large share of those calls are data lookups. But when that data lives across a network, latency compounds and every flaky call has to be retried - and a retry means re-sending the entire context window, which isn’t cheap. chDB fixes this by embedding a full ClickHouse query engine inside the agent's own process, so memory, session state, and hot lookups are now a local function call away. Tuning ClickHouse for high concurrency Sanil Upadhyay explains how to tweak ClickHouse settings to handle many concurrent small queries rather than a few large ones. Announcing Silk: a silky smooth fiber runtime for ClickHouse James Cunningham and Vadim Skipin introduce Silk, an open-source C++ fiber runtime designed to reduce tail latency in I/O-bound work such as distributed cache lookups and object storage access. Silk pairs a NUMA-aware work-stealing scheduler with io uring and zero heap allocation on the hot path, yielding fibers in about 3.6 nanoseconds and hitting 5.9 million file IOPS. This is roughly 15x the throughput of boost::asio at one connection, and 65% better at the 99.9th-percentile latency than a thread-pool executor at 10,000 concurrent S3-style requests. Quick reads - Zepto fixed a ClickHouse ingestion bottleneck under Confluent Cloud by patching the open-source Kafka Connect connector https://blog.zepto.com/clickhouse-ingestion-at-scale-an-open-source-zepto-engineering-story-7f57309e2175 with cross-poll buffering and rewriting the serialization logic to use Jackson instead of Gson, boosting throughput 45%. Reshma https://www.linkedin.com/in/reshmamuthu/ walks through ClickHouse's built-in geospatial functions https://www.quantrail-data.com/clickhouse-geospatial-functions-for-location-data , showing how to do distance calculations, geohash indexing, and geofencing directly in SQL for use cases like ride-sharing, delivery, and fleet tracking.- Sergio De Simone explains how Momentic redesigned its AI-testing cache on ClickHouse after Postgres buckled under lock contention at ~1 billion entries, using ReplacingMergeTree and a composite primary key to scale to 20 billion entries at 2M+ queries/day and ~250ms latency https://www.infoq.com/news/2026/07/momentic-postgres-clickhouse/ . - Muhammad Ali wired a Claude-powered SRE agent https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/i-gave-clickhouse-agents-my-telemetry-understand-traffic-muhammad-ali-y1hkc/ to his OpenTelemetry data via ClickHouse Agents, and it dug through the logs, traces, and metrics to surface sqlmap SQL-injection probes, Nuclei vulnerability scans, and unauthenticated endpoints leaking credentials. - Gaurav Pant explains why ClickHouse is so fast https://medium.com/@gaurav.pant./why-clickhouse-is-so-fast-the-right-olap-1bdeb761de4e , showing how columnar storage, a sparse primary index, SIMD vectorization, and immutable parts stack up, so that each layer multiplies the benefits of the others. - Justin Torre shows how they safely let customers run arbitrary SQL against a shared, multi-tenant ClickHouse table by https://www.justintorre.com/blogs/clickhouse-rls-query-parameters enforcing tenancy in the database with a row policy and per-query settings. Get started today Interested in seeing how ClickHouse works on your data? Get started with ClickHouse Cloud in minutes and receive $300 in free credits. Sign up https://console.clickhouse.cloud/signUp?loc=blog-cta-1334-get-started-today-sign-up&utm blogctaid=1334 Upcoming events Global virtual events Live Q&A: Ask a ClickHouse Expert https://clickhouse.com/company/events/202607-EMEA-Webinar-AskanExpert - Jul 21, 2026 v26.7 Community Call https://clickhouse.com/company/events/v26-7-community-release-call - Jul 23, 2026 How to build a unified data stack with Postgres and ClickHouse https://clickhouse.com/company/events/202607-AMER-Webinar-Postgres-ClickHouse - Jul 28, 2026 Build Better LLM Apps https://clickhouse.com/company/events/202607 APJ Event Build-Better-LLM-Apps - Jul 30, 2026 ClickHouse Open Office & Live AMA https://clickhouse.com/company/events/202608-APJ-Webinar-Open-Office-AMA - Aug 6, 2026 Measuring the True Cost of Real-Time Analytics https://clickhouse.com/company/events/202608-EMEA-Webinar-Costbench - Aug 18, 2026 Virtual training Query Optimization with ClickHouse Workshop https://clickhouse.com/company/events/202607-AMER-EMEA-query-optimization-workshop - Jul 22, 2026 ClickHouse Fundamentals https://clickhouse.com/company/events/202607-APJ-ClickHouse-Fundamentals - Jul 28, 2026 Data Warehousing with ClickHouse: Level 1 https://clickhouse.com/company/events/202607-AMER-Data-Warehousing-Level1 - Jul 28, 2026 Data Warehousing with ClickHouse: Level 2 https://clickhouse.com/company/events/202607-AMER-data-warehousing-Level2 - Jul 29, 2026 Data Warehousing with ClickHouse: Level 3 https://clickhouse.com/company/events/202607-AMER-data-warehousing-Level3 - Jul 30, 2026 Real-time Analytics with ClickHouse: Level 1 https://clickhouse.com/company/events/202608-EMEA-AMER-Real-time-Analytics-w-ClickHouse-Level1 - Aug 4, 2026 Real-time Analytics with ClickHouse: Level 2 https://clickhouse.com/company/events/202608-EMEA-AMER-Real-time-Analytics-w-ClickHouse-Level2 - Aug 5, 2026 Real-time Analytics with ClickHouse: Level 3 https://clickhouse.com/company/events/202608-EMEA-AMER-Real-time-Analytics-w-ClickHouse-Level3 - Aug 6, 2026 ClickHouse Fundamentals https://clickhouse.com/company/events/202608-AMER-EMEA-ClickHouse-Fundamentals - Aug 19, 2026 Events in EMEA Open House AMS https://clickhouse.com/openhouse/amsterdam-2026 - Sept 1 The Agentic Data Stack: Berlin https://luma.com/clickh-2ccj - Sep 2 TechRace Summit: Poland https://techracesummit.com/ - Sep 10 Signals Berlin https://signalsconf.io/ Langfuse - Sept 10 AWS Summit Tel Aviv https://aws.amazon.com/events/summits/tel-aviv/ - Sept 10 ClickHouse Amsterdam with Ayden https://luma.com/clickh-vu1p - Sep 15 ClickHouse CapeTown Happy Hour https://luma.com/clickh-dw1v - Sep 15 BigDataParis https://www.bigdataparis.com/en-gb.html - Sept 15-16 AgentCon + MCPCon https://events.linuxfoundation.org/agntcon-mcpcon-europe/ - Sept 17-18 IDC Madrid https://event.idc.com/event/ai-data-summit-spain/ - Sept 22 ClickHouse Paris Meetup https://luma.com/clickh-gsz1 - Sep 29 Open House UK https://clickhouse.com/openhouse/london-2026 - Sept 30 Agentic AI Forum Dubai https://www.agenticaiforum.net/ - Sept 30 Events in AMER Hands-on training: Building agents with ClickHouse, Langfuse, and LibreChat https://luma.com/clickh-9f9d - San Francisco, CA - Jul 21, 2026 Happy Hour Warm-up AWS Summit Bogotá https://luma.com/clickh-bkld - Jul 29, 2026 AWS Summit Bogotá https://clickhouse.com/company/events/202607-LATAM-AWS-Summit-Colombia - Jul 30, 2026 Capacitación presencial en Buenos Aires: Analytics en tiempo real con ClickHouse https://clickhouse.com/company/events/202608-LATAM-Buesno-Aires-Real-time-Analytics-with-ClickHouse - Buenos Aires - Aug 4, 2026 Capacitación presencial en Santiago: Analytics en tiempo real con ClickHouse https://clickhouse.com/company/events/202608-LATAM-Santiago-Real-time-Analytics-with-ClickHouse - Santiago - Aug 6, 2026 AI Demo Night https://luma.com/qeg73alr - Seattle, WA - Aug 6, 2026 AWS Summit Mexico City https://clickhouse.com/company/events/202607-LATAM-AWS-Summit-Mexico-City - Aug 12, 2026 Data Engineering Meetup https://luma.com/clickh-z578 - San Francisco, CA - Aug 11, 2026 AI Demo Night https://luma.com/c4alsewg - New York, NY - Aug 18, 2026 NYC Iceberg™ Meetup https://luma.com/t3z5q5s8 - New York, NY - Aug 20, 2026 Vancouver Meetup https://luma.com/jr8tc94e - Vancouver, Canada - Aug 25, 2026 ClickHouse Hackathon https://luma.com/clickh-sie8 - San Francisco, CA - Aug 28, 2026 Open House New York https://luma.com/sl4dcdhx 🏠 - New York, NY - Sep 10, 2026 Rows and Columns Summit https://luma.com/clickh-wavw - San Francisco, CA - Sep 22, 2026 Events in APAC ClickHouse in the Wild: Architecture Stories from Production https://clickhouse.com/company/events/ch-del-meetup-18jul26 - Delhi - Jul 18, 2026 Training: Real-time Analytics with ClickHouse Level 1 https://clickhouse.com/company/events/202607-APJ-Training-Japan-RealTimeAnalytics-Level1 - Tokyo - Jul 22, 2026 DataEngBytes Melbourne https://clickhouse.com/company/events/202607-APJ-3P-Melbourne-DataEngBytes - Jul 23, 2026 Bangkok OSS & Data Evening: Queries, Code & Community https://clickhouse.com/company/events/ch-bkk-meetup-23jul26 - Jul 23, 2026 Lakes to Queries: Building High-Performance Data Platforms https://clickhouse.com/company/events/ch-bom-meetup-25jul26 - Mumbai - Jul 25, 2026 ClickHouse BUILD hands-on workshop - Singapore https://clickhouse.com/company/events/2026-07-APJ-ASEAN-Singapore-BuildWorkshop - Jul 28, 2026 DataEngBytes Sydney https://clickhouse.com/company/events/202607-APJ-3P-Sydney-DataEngBytes - Jul 28, 2026 Google Cloud Next Tokyo https://clickhouse.com/company/events/202607-APJ-3P-Tokyo-GoogleNext - Jul 30, 2026 Click-a-Thon India https://clickhouse.com/clickathon/india2026 - Bangalore - August 1-2, 2026 ClickHouse BUILD hands-on workshop - Jakarta https://clickhouse.com/company/events/2026-08-APJ-ASEAN-Indonesia-Jakarta-BuildWorkshop - Aug 5, 2026 ClickHouse Jakarta Meetup - August 2026 https://clickhouse.com/company/events/ch-jkt-meetup-05aug26 - Aug 5, 2026 Open House Roadshow - Sydney https://clickhouse.com/company/events/202608-sydney-open-house - Aug 11, 2026 Sydney In-person training - One Database, Every Workload: A ClickHouse Workshop https://clickhouse.com/company/events/202608-APJ-Sydney-One-Database-Every-Workload - Aug 11, 2026 Open House Roadshow - Melbourne https://clickhouse.com/company/events/202608-melbourne-open-house - Aug 13, 2026 Melbourne In-person training - One Database, Every Workload: A ClickHouse Workshop https://clickhouse.com/company/events/202608-APJ-Melbourne-One-Database-Every-Workload - Aug 13, 2026 Bangalore Iceberg Community Meetup https://clickhouse.com/company/events/ch-blr-meetup-22aug26 - Aug 22, 2026