Connecting ClickHouse to Holistics

Community Maintained

Holistics is an AI-native self-service BI platform with a programmable semantic layer for consistent, trustworthy metrics.

By connecting ClickHouse to Holistics, your teams get a fast, reliable AI-powered self-service experience grounded in a code-based semantic layer. Business users can explore data confidently with drag-and-drop and AI, while you keep metric definitions reusable, composable, and version-controlled in Git.

Prerequisites

Before connecting, ensure you have the following:

• Permissions: You must be an Admin in Holistics to add new Data Sources.
• Network Access: Your ClickHouse server must be accessible from Holistics' IP addresses.
• Database User: Create a dedicated, read-only user for Holistics rather than using an admin account.

Recommended privileges

The dedicated user requires SELECT privileges on the tables you wish to query, as well as the system tables (for schema detection).

-- Example: Grant read access to a specific database
GRANT SELECT ON my_database.* TO holistics_user;

-- Grant access to system metadata
GRANT SELECT ON system.* TO holistics_user;

Gather connection details

To connect to ClickHouse with HTTP(S) you will need this information:

Parameter	Description
Host	The hostname of your ClickHouse server (e.g., mz322.eu-central-1.aws.clickhouse.cloud).
Port	8443 for ClickHouse Cloud (SSL/TLS). 8123 for self-managed instances without SSL.
Database Name	The name of the database you want to connect to. The default is usually default.
Username	The database user. The default is default.
Password	The password for the database user.

You can find these details by clicking the Connect button in your ClickHouse Cloud console and selecting HTTPS.

Configure network access

Since Holistics is a cloud-based application, its servers must be able to reach your database. You have two options:

1. Direct Connection (Recommended): Allowlist Holistics' IP addresses in your firewall or ClickHouse Cloud IP Access List. You can find the list of IPs in the IP Whitelisting guide.

2. Reverse SSH Tunnel: If your database is in a private network (VPC) and cannot be exposed publicly, use a Reverse SSH Tunnel.

Add data source in Holistics

1. In Holistics, go to Settings → Data Sources.

2. Click New Data Source and select ClickHouse.

3. Fill in the form with the details gathered in Step 1.

   Field	Setting
   Host	Your ClickHouse Hostname
   Port	8443 (or 8123)
   Require SSL	Toggle ON if using port 8443 (Required for ClickHouse Cloud).
   Database Name	default (or your specific DB)

4. Click Test Connection.

   • Success: Click Save.
   • Failure: Check your username/password and ensure the Holistics IPs are allowlisted.

Known limitations

Holistics supports most standard SQL features in ClickHouse, with the following exceptions:

• Running Total: This analytic function currently has limited support on ClickHouse.
• Nested Data Types: Deeply nested JSON or Array structures may require flattening via SQL models before visualization.

For a full list of supported features, please refer to the Database-specific Limitations page.