Data warehousing
The modern data warehouse no longer tightly couples storage and compute. Instead, distinct but interconnected layers for storage, governance, and query processing give you the flexibility to choose the right tools for your workflows.
By adding open table formats and a high-performance query engine like ClickHouse to cloud object storage, you get database-grade capabilities — ACID transactions, schema enforcement, and fast analytical queries — without sacrificing the openness of your data lake. This combination brings performance together with interoperable, cost-effective storage to support your traditional analytics and modern AI/ML workloads.
What this architecture provides
By combining open object storage and table formats with ClickHouse as your query engine, you get:
| Benefit | Description |
|---|---|
| Consistent table updates | Atomic commits to table state mean concurrent writes don't produce corrupt or partial data. This solves one of the biggest problems with raw data lakes. |
| Schema management | Enforced validation and tracked schema evolution prevent the "data swamp" problem where data becomes unusable due to schema inconsistencies. |
| Query performance | Indexing, statistics, and data layout optimizations like data skipping and clustering let SQL queries run at speeds comparable to a dedicated data warehouse. Combined with ClickHouse's columnar engine, this holds true even on data stored in object storage. |
| Governance | Catalogs and table formats provide fine-grained access control and auditing at row and column levels, addressing the limited security controls in basic data lakes. |
| Separation of storage and compute | Storage and compute scale independently on commodity object storage, which is significantly cheaper than proprietary warehouse storage. While separation is standard in modern cloud warehouses, open formats let you choose which compute engine scales with your data. |
How ClickHouse powers your data warehouse
Data flows from streaming platforms and existing warehouses through object storage into ClickHouse, where it's transformed, optimized, and served to your BI/AI tools.
ClickHouse handles four key parts of the data warehousing workflow: getting data in, querying it, transforming it, and connecting it to the tools your team already uses.
Data ingestion
For bulk data loads, you typically use an object store like S3 or GCS as an intermediary. ClickHouse's Parquet reading performance lets you load data at hundreds of millions of rows per second using the S3 table engine. For real-time streaming, ClickPipes connects directly to platforms like Kafka and Confluent.
You can also migrate from existing data warehouses like Snowflake, BigQuery, and Databricks by exporting to object storage and loading into ClickHouse via table engines.
Querying
You can query data directly from object stores like S3 and GCS, or from data lakes with open table formats like Iceberg, Delta Lake, and Hudi. You can connect to these formats directly or through data catalogs like AWS Glue Catalog, Unity Catalog, and Iceberg REST.
Queries on materialized views are fast because their summarized results are automatically stored in dedicated tables, making downstream querying more responsive no matter how much data you're analyzing. While other database providers hide accelerating features behind higher pricing tiers or additional charges, ClickHouse Cloud offers the query cache, sparse indexes, and projections out of the box for repeated and latency-sensitive queries.
ClickHouse supports 70+ file formats and SQL functions for working with dates, arrays, JSON, geo, and approximate aggregations at scale.
Data transformations
Data transformations are common pillars in business intelligence and analytics workflows. Materialized views in ClickHouse automate them — these SQL-based views are triggered when new data is inserted into source tables, so you can extract, aggregate, and modify data as it arrives without building and managing bespoke transformation pipelines.
For more complex modeling workflows, ClickHouse's dbt integration lets you define transformations as version-controlled SQL models and migrate existing dbt jobs to run directly on ClickHouse.
Integrations
ClickHouse has native connectors for BI tools like Tableau and Looker. Tools without a native connector can connect through the MySQL wire protocol without additional setup. For semantic layer workflows, ClickHouse integrates with Cube to let your team define metrics once and query them from any downstream tool. Companies across financial services, gaming, e-commerce, and more rely on these integrations to unlock value from data as soon as it arrives, powering live dashboards and business intelligence workflows.
ClickHouse also supports a REST interface, so you can build lightweight applications without complex binary protocols. The MCP server connects ClickHouse to LLMs for conversational analytics through tools like LibreChat or Claude. Flexible RBAC and quota controls let you expose read-only tables publicly for client-side data fetching.
Hybrid architecture: The best of both worlds
Beyond querying your data lake, you can ingest performance-critical data into ClickHouse's native MergeTree storage for use cases that demand ultra-low latency — real-time dashboards, operational analytics, or interactive applications.
This gives you a tiered data strategy. Hot, frequently accessed data lives in ClickHouse's optimized storage for sub-second query responses, while the complete data history stays in the lake and remains queryable. You can also use ClickHouse materialized views to continuously transform and aggregate lake data into optimized tables, bridging the two tiers automatically.
You choose where data lives based on performance requirements, not technical limitations.
Take the free Data Warehousing with ClickHouse course to learn more.
