After the success of our ClickHouse Open House conference in San Francisco in May, we knew we had to take this show on the road.
On October 7th, the ClickHouse community came together in New York to hear from ClickHouse customers Capital One, Ramp, and Modal, alongside the ClickHouse product and leadership teams.
For those who couldn't make it, and for attendees who want to revisit the sessions, we've now released the recordings from the event!
We organized the presentations around four key use cases showcasing where ClickHouse shines.
First is real-time analytics, or 'immersive data-driven applications,' that need both recent and historical data with instant interactive filtering. As one of our customers puts it, they're building apps where users expect responses right away, not in 5-10 seconds.
The second use case is observability, where SREs and DevOps teams increasingly adopt ClickHouse as observability data keeps getting more voluminous and structured over time. Companies like eBay moved from Elastic to ClickHouse early on, and we're seeing this trend accelerate as teams want more control over their data to build AI-enabled monitoring features.
The third is data warehousing, which includes leveraging ClickHouse as an interactive query layer on top of data lakes. The key word here is 'interactive.' Traditional query engines are optimized for batch workloads, but when you're applying AI to your data warehouse or data lake, you need that human-level responsiveness where you can ask a question, get a quick response, and iterate.
And finally, there's AI and ML infrastructure itself - ClickHouse is being used for data prep and transformation, as an offline and online feature store for model training and inference, for vector search, and of course for observability of AI systems. It's become essential infrastructure for data science teams.
Capital One: Real-time analytics #
Capital One, the banking and credit card company, uses ClickHouse to power its Slingshot data management and cost optimization platform.
Salim Sayed and Syd Mehmood chose ClickHouse for its speed, scalability, and cost efficiency. They transformed dashboard load times from 5-6 seconds to under half a second, achieving 80% improvement in response times while cutting infrastructure costs by 50%.
➡️ How Capital One Slingshot cut infrastructure costs by 50%
Ramp: Observability #
Ramp, a finance operations platform, faced challenges scaling analytics queries on Postgres. Four engineers were tasked with solving this problem, and within four weeks, they had put their new ClickHouse-based system into QA.
Ryan Delgado, who leads Ramp’s platform team, walks through the story and explains why turning those slow queries into reports that ran hundreds of times faster was so impactful that his entire OLAP team got promoted.
➡️ ClickHouse at Ramp: Just OLAP it
Modal Labs: Data warehousing #
Modal is an infrastructure platform for running large-scale GPU workloads in the cloud. They use ClickHouse as the backbone of their real-time observability platform.
In this talk, Ro Arepally explains how they solved a scaling bottleneck by switching to ClickHouse, transforming their logging infrastructure into a system that handles half a trillion logs and delivers instant search results.
➡️ How Modal delivers instant search on 500B+ logs
What's Next #
Each of these stories deserves a deeper dive. Over the coming weeks, we’ll break down the technical architectures and lessons learned in individual posts on our blog.
The Open House Roadshow continues! We're bringing these conversations to more cities, connecting with data teams who are pushing the boundaries of what's possible with real-time analytics.
Check out the full video playlist from NYC, stay tuned for videos from Sydney and Bangalore, and join us at our final roadshow stop in Amsterdam on October 28th.
