SQL updates in ClickHouse 26.3

Mark Needham

ClickHouse 26.3 adds several SQL quality-of-life improvements. In this video, Mark walks through five new features:

• naturalSortKey() — sorts strings like version numbers in the order humans expect
• JSONExtractString and has() now work with the native JSON type
• EXPLAIN pretty and compact options for readable query plan output
• NOW, CURRENT_DATE, CURRENT_TIMESTAMP without parentheses (SQL standard compatibility)
• caseFoldUTF8, removeDiacriticsUTF8, normalizeUTF8NFKCCasefold — new Unicode string functions

More from the 26.3 release: https://clickhouse.com/blog/clickhouse-release-26-03