Introduction
Modern, data-driven applications need a way to communicate with persistent data storage. Implementing this communication on the network layer is time-consuming and requires understanding low-level concepts such as connection management, data formatting and data marshalling. Language clients are a standard pattern to provide a language specific abstraction which hides the technical complexity of connecting to a datastore.
ClickHouse already provided official language clients in Java, Python, and Go. Today, we're happy to introduce an official, fully-featured open-source Node.js client to join the family. The client was created to deliver blazing-fast performance and ease of use of ClickHouse in the Node.js ecosystem. This language client joins our growing list of ClickHouse core integrations (maintained and supported by ClickHouse).
Client features
- Written entirely in TypeScript with strong typing (including all ClickHouse server settings)
- Node.JS 14.x, 16.x, 18.x runtimes
- HTTP(s) protocol with persistent connection
- HTTP request and response compression
- Node.js streaming API for both data insertion and selection
- Support for a variety of data input and output formats - JSON, CSV, TabSeparated, and CustomSeparated formats families
- Support for the majority of the ClickHouse data types
- Parametrized queries
- Request cancellation
- Custom logger support
- Extensive continuous testing with ClickHouse Cloud and the latest actual ClickHouse versions
Code samples for the most common usecases are available in our repository examples folder. Additionally, we recommend reviewing the integration tests folder for further examples.
Why we decided to write our client
OSS enthusiasts are the key to creating a flourishing ecosystem. We see our primary goal as assisting the community in nurturing an open ecosystem around ClickHouse. As language clients are an integral part of the ClickHouse ecosystem, we decided to formalize a common specification for language client architecture and functionality. This provides recommendations for anyone creating a client in their favorite programming language and captures expected functionality with guidance on solving common problems. We aim to reduce the maintenance and developer onboarding costs though a standard specification which all clients can follow, contributing to a better developer experience.
A few months ago, we created a first draft of the language client specification and considered the Node.js client a good candidate to try out and validate the ideas described in the document. You can find a draft of the spec in this live document. Feel free to share your thoughts there. We plan to adapt the spec to the customers' needs iteratively by getting feedback from the community. We welcome any ideas about what functionality the standard language client should provide, what the API should look like, what tooling is needed to simplify long-term maintenance, etc. Gradually all clients will aim conform to this specification.
Closing words and call for contribution
We've just released the very first versions of the client. We can't wait to hear how you use the client in your applications and get feedback about the features it provides, API ergonomics, performance, and possible improvements.
Have fun experimenting, and see you in our repository.
Links
- GitHub repository: https://github.com/ClickHouse/clickhouse-js
- NPM registry: https://www.npmjs.com/package/@clickhouse/client
If you’re enthusiastic about the latest technologies and are passionate about Open Source, we’re currently hiring for our integrations team and would love to hear from you.
