Firebolt is built on a natively decoupled storage & compute architecture, on AWS only. Data has to be copied outside of your VPC into the Firebolt, where both your compute and data run in a dedicated and isolated tenant. A “Firebolt Engine” can be granularly configured across # of nodes and different CPU/RAM/SSD combinations.
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 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.
Firebolt can handle the largest data volumes and concurrency on a single comparable cluster size, thanks to its superior hardware efficiency. Thanks to its decoupled storage & compute architecture it scales very well to large data volumes. However, resizing an engine size isn’t instant and requires orchestration if avoiding downtime is necessary. A single Firebolt engine can support hundreds of concurrent queries, avoiding the need to scale out for most use cases. Scaling horizontally for even higher concurrency is manual.
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.
Firebolt is the fastest when it comes to query performance when compared to cloud data warehouses and services like Athena. Its unique approach to storage and indexing results in highly aggressive data pruning that scans dramatically less data compared to other technologies. While other technologies scan partitions or micro-partitions, Firebolt works with indexed data ranges, that are significantly smaller. In addition, Firebolt lets user accelerate queries further with multiple index types (Aggregating index, Join index), and using its decoupled storage & compute architecture workloads can be easily isolated to guarantee consistent performance.
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.
Firebolt stands out by being the fastest cloud data warehouse when compared to Snowflake, Redshift, BigQuery and Athena. It’s great for delivering sub-second analytics at scale, while remaining hardware efficient and high concurrency friendly. This makes it a great choice for operational use cases and customer-facing data apps. Given that it is not as feature-rich and integration rich as the more mature data warehouses makes it a lesser fit for a general-purpose Enterprise data warehouse. It is also not the best fit for ad-hoc use cases, because of the need to predefine indexing at the table level.
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.
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