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Quick Start

ClickHouse can run on any Linux, FreeBSD, or Mac OS X with x86_64, AArch64, or PowerPC64LE CPU architecture. Follow these steps to get up and running with ClickHouse.

note

If your OS is not supported or for other install options, view the installation details in the technical reference guide.

1. Start ClickHouse​

  1. The simplest way to download ClickHouse locally is to run the following command. If your operating system is supported, an appropriate ClickHouse binary will be downloaded and made executable:

    curl https://clickhouse.com/ | sh

  2. Run the install command, which defines a collection of useful symlinks along with the files and folders used by ClickHouse - all of which you can see in the output of the install script:

    sudo ./clickhouse install

  3. At the end of the install script, you are prompted for a password for the default user. Feel free to enter a password, or you can optionally leave it blank:

    Creating log directory /var/log/clickhouse-server.
    Creating data directory /var/lib/clickhouse.
    Creating pid directory /var/run/clickhouse-server.
     chown -R clickhouse:clickhouse '/var/log/clickhouse-server'
     chown -R clickhouse:clickhouse '/var/run/clickhouse-server'
     chown  clickhouse:clickhouse '/var/lib/clickhouse'
    Enter password for default user:

    You should see the following output:

    ClickHouse has been successfully installed.

    Start clickhouse-server with:
     sudo clickhouse start

    Start clickhouse-client with:
     clickhouse-client

  4. Run the following command to start the ClickHouse server:

    sudo clickhouse start

2. Connect to ClickHouse​

  1. The ClickHouse server listens for HTTP clients on port 8123 by default. There is a built-in UI for running SQL queries at http://127.0.0.1:8123/play (change the hostname accordingly).

    The Play UI

  2. Notice in your Play UI that the username was populated with default and the password text field was left empty. If you assigned a password to the default user, enter it into the password field.

  3. Try running a query. For example, the following returns the names of the predefined databases:

    SHOW databases

  4. Click the RUN button and the response is displayed in the lower portion of the Play UI:

    View the results

3. Create a Table​

  1. As in most databases management systems, ClickHouse logically groups tables into databases. Use the CREATE DATABASE command to create a new database in ClickHouse:

    CREATE DATABASE IF NOT EXISTS helloworld

  2. Even the simplest of tables in ClickHouse must specify a table engine. The engine determines details about the table like:

    • how and where the data is stored,
    • which queries are supported, and
    • whether or not the data is replicated.

    There are many engines to choose from, but for a simple table on a single-node ClickHouse server, MergeTree is your likely choice. Run the following command to create a table named my_first_table in the helloworld database:

    CREATE TABLE helloworld.my_first_table
    (
        user_id UInt32,
        message String,
        timestamp DateTime,
        metric Float32
    )
    ENGINE = MergeTree()
    PRIMARY KEY (user_id, timestamp)

A Brief Intro to Primary Keys​

Before you go any further, it is important to understand how primary keys work in ClickHouse (the implementation of primary keys might seem unexpected!):

  • primary keys in ClickHouse are not unique for each row in a table

The primary key of a ClickHouse table determines how the data is sorted when written to disk. Every 8,192 rows or 10MB of data (referred to as the index granularity) creates an entry in the primary key index file. This granularity concept creates a sparse index that can easily fit in memory, and the granules represent a stripe of the smallest amount of column data that gets processed during SELECT queries.

The primary key can be defined using the PRIMARY KEY command. If you define a table without a PRIMARY KEY specified, then the key becomes the tuple specified in the ORDER BY clause. If you specify both a PRIMARY KEY and an ORDER BY, the primary key must be a subset of the sort order.

In the example above, my_first_table is a MergeTree table with four columns:

  • user_id: a 32-bit unsigned integer
  • message: a String data type, which replaces types like VARCHAR, BLOB, CLOB and others from other database systems
  • timestamp: a DateTime value, which represents an instant in time
  • metric: a 32-bit floating point number

The primary key is also the sorting key, which is a tuple of (user_id, timestamp). Therefore, the data stored in each column file will be sorted by user_id, then timestamp.

4. Insert Data​

You can use the familiar INSERT INTO TABLE command with ClickHouse, but it is important to understand that each insert into a MergeTree table causes a part to be created in storage.

The best practice with ClickHouse is to insert a large number of rows per batch - tens of thousands or even millions of rows at once. (Don't worry - ClickHouse can easily handle that type of volume!)

  1. Even for a simple example, let's insert more than one row at a time:

    INSERT INTO helloworld.my_first_table (user_id, message, timestamp, metric) VALUES
        (101, 'Hello, ClickHouse!',                                 now(),       -1.0    ),
        (102, 'Insert a lot of rows per batch',                     yesterday(), 1.41421 ),
        (102, 'Sort your data based on your commonly-used queries', today(),     2.718   ),
        (101, 'Granules are the smallest chunks of data read',      now() + 5,   3.14159 )
    note

    Notice the timestamp column is populated using various Date and DateTime functions. ClickHouse has hundreds of useful functions that you can view in the Functions section.

  2. Let's verify it worked:

    SELECT * FROM helloworld.my_first_table

    You should see the four rows of data that were inserted:

    New rows inserted

5. The ClickHouse Client​

  1. You can also connect to your ClickHouse server using a command-line tool named clickhouse-client:
    clickhouse-client

  1. If you get the smiley face prompt, you are ready to run queries!

    :)

    Give it a try by running the following query:

    SELECT *
    FROM helloworld.my_first_table
    ORDER BY timestamp

    Notice the response comes back in a nice table format:

    SELECT *
    FROM helloworld.my_first_table
    ORDER BY timestamp ASC

    Query id: f7a33012-bc8c-4f0f-9641-260ee1ffe4b8

    ┌─user_id─┬─message────────────────────────────────────────────┬───────────timestamp─┬──metric─┐
    │     102 │ Insert a lot of rows per batch                     │ 2022-03-21 00:00:00 │ 1.41421 │
    │     102 │ Sort your data based on your commonly-used queries │ 2022-03-22 00:00:00 │   2.718 │
    │     101 │ Hello, ClickHouse!                                 │ 2022-03-22 14:04:09 │      -1 │
    │     101 │ Granules are the smallest chunks of data read      │ 2022-03-22 14:04:14 │ 3.14159 │
    └─────────┴────────────────────────────────────────────────────┴─────────────────────┴─────────┘

    4 rows in set. Elapsed: 0.008 sec.

  2. Add a FORMAT clause to specify one of the many supported output formats of ClickHouse:

    SELECT *
    FROM helloworld.my_first_table
    ORDER BY timestamp
    FORMAT TabSeparated

    In the above query, the output is returned as tab-separated:

    Query id: 3604df1c-acfd-4117-9c56-f86c69721121

    102 Insert a lot of rows per batch  2022-03-21 00:00:00 1.41421
    102 Sort your data based on your commonly-used queries  2022-03-22 00:00:00 2.718
    101 Hello, ClickHouse!  2022-03-22 14:04:09 -1
    101 Granules are the smallest chunks of data read   2022-03-22 14:04:14 3.14159

    4 rows in set. Elapsed: 0.005 sec.

  3. To exit the clickhouse-client, enter the exit command:

    :) exit
    Bye.

6. Insert a CSV file​

A common task when getting started with a database is to insert some data that you already have in files. We have some sample data online that you can insert that represents clickstream data - it includes a user ID, a URL that was visited, and the timestamp of the event.

  1. Suppose we have the following text in a CSV file named data.csv:

    102,This is data in a file,2022-02-22 10:43:28,123.45
    101,It is comma-separated,2022-02-23 00:00:00,456.78
    103,Use FORMAT to specify the format,2022-02-21 10:43:30,678.90

  2. The following command inserts the data into my_first_table:

    clickhouse-client --query='INSERT INTO helloworld.my_first_table FORMAT CSV' < data.csv

  3. Notice the new rows appear in the table now:

    New rows from CSV file

What's Next?​