I've spent the past 10 years working in the data analytics & engineering space, architecting nation-state cyber defence systems, consulting for global financial institutions, and leading developer relations & experience teams at early stage startups.
Al Brown
Product Marketing Engineer at ClickHouse
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Blog posts by Al Brown
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Resources by Al Brown
Top 5 cloud data warehouses in 2026: Architecture, cost, and open-source
Al Brown • Last updated: Apr 13, 2026
Compare the top cloud data warehouses of 2025: Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, Databricks, and ClickHouse. Analyze cost efficiency, real-time performance, and open-source architecture.
What is OLAP? A complete guide to online analytical processing
Al Brown • Last updated: Apr 13, 2026
A complete guide to OLAP: how it works, how it has evolved from cubes to columnar databases, and how to choose the right OLAP database for your workload.
Unifying OLTP and OLAP: HTAP databases, zero-ETL, and best-of-breed architectures
Al Brown • Last updated: Mar 29, 2026
A complete guide to unifying transactional and analytical workloads. Covers HTAP databases, zero-ETL integration, Postgres CDC, columnar databases, and how composable architectures beat converged systems.
The definitive guide to ClickHouse query optimization (2026)
Al Brown, Tom Schreiber and Lionel Palacin • Last updated: Jan 26, 2026
Master ClickHouse query optimization through architectural understanding. Learn why ORDER BY design can improve performance 100×, plus proven techniques for trillion-row millisecond queries.
MCP and Data Warehouses: everything you need to know
Al Brown • Last updated: Nov 29, 2025
This article explores the suitability of MCP with Data Warehouses, and discusses the business and technical details you need to know to succeed.