Clickhouse was originally developed at Yandex, the Russian search engine, as an OLAP engine for low latency analytics. It was built as an on-premise solution with coupled storage & compute, and a large variety of tuning options in the form of indexes and merge trees. Clickhouse’s architecture is famous for its focus on performance and low-latency queries. The tradeoff is that it is considered very difficult to work with. SQL support is very limited, and tuning/running it requires significant engineering resources.
Databricks was built by the founders of Spark as an analytics platform to support machine learning use cases. It leverages the Spark framework to process data residing in a data lake and is supported on AWS, GCP and Azure. Databricks coined the marketing term “Lakehouse '' architecture to illustrate the unification of data lake and data warehouse use cases. Customers still manage Spark clusters that process data residing in a Delta lake. Conversion of data to Delta Lake format is required to leverage the functionality of Delta Lake. Databricks Sql is a relatively new addition to simplify access to data stored in a data lake.
Clickhouse doesn’t offer any dedicated scaling features or mechanisms. While it can deliver linearly scalable performance for some types of queries, scaling itself has to be done manually. Hardware is self-managed in Clickhouse. This means that to scale you would have to provision a cluster and migrate.
Databricks allow for autoscaling of clusters based on utilization. Additionally, increasing concurrency associated with a sql endpoint can be accomplished through the addition of clusters. Query concurrency per cluster is maxed at 10. However, scaling with additional clusters for concurrency is possible. Databricks provides a choice of instance types.
Clickhouse is famous for being one of the fastest local runtimes ever built for OLAP workloads. Its columnar storage, compression and indexing capabilities make it a consistent leader in benchmarks. Its lack of support for standard SQL and lack of query optimizer means that it’s less suitable for traditional BI workloads, and more suitable for engineering managed workloads. While fast, it requires a lot of tuning and optimization.
Databricks is designed to leverage the Spark framework for processing large volumes of data. It leverages compressed Parquet files in a Delta Lake. To reduce the amount of data processed, it uses data pruning on partitions and Parquet file metadata. Databricks does not provide any indexes.
Clickhouse was not designed to be a data warehouse, but rather a low-latency query execution runtime. Managing it typically requires significant engineering overhead. Hence, it’s a good fit for engineering managed operational use cases and customer-facing data apps, where low latency matters. It is not a good fit for a general purpose data warehouse, nor for Ad-Hoc analytics or ELT.
Databricks is a mature Spark based platform proven for processing streaming data. It is widely used for Machine Learning use cases by data scientists through the use of integrated notebooks. From a low latency query perspective, while it offers features like Delta Cache, it does not provide specialized indexes that can deliver low latency queries.
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