Show HN: Postgres Columnstore index vs. ClickHouse for OLAP queries

https://www.tablespace.io/blog/postgres-columnstore-index-vs-clickhouse

by smythe123 • 2 years ago

1 8 2 years ago

tablespace.io

pvg2• 2 years ago

Show HN is for things you've made people can try, take a look at https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html.

You can post this as a regular post, without the 'Show HN'.

smythe1234• 2 years ago

Hi there. CEO of Tablespace here. We have indeed made something that people can try ;) We built a Columnstore index for Postgres which allows users to run fast OLAP analytics on Postgres. We just launched in open beta and are looking for feedback, comments, questions. The blog post is a comparison of Tablespace vs. ClickHouse for OLAP workloads. We also included links to the benchmark scripts that people can run themselves as well.

pvg2• 2 years ago

You can post the blog post as a regular submission, you can post whatever it is you want people to try as a Show HN, you can't post a blog post as a Show HN. That's in the thing I linked:

Off topic: blog posts, sign-up pages, newsletters, lists, and other reading material. Those can't be tried out, so can't be Show HNs. Make a regular submission instead.

qoega• 2 years ago

Are you guy comparing 16vCPU/32GB vs 8vCPU/32GB and say yours is only 1.6 faster?

smythe1234• 2 years ago

Hi there CEO of Tablespace here, no we are comparing 16CPU/32GB which Tablespace used to 24CPU/96GiB which ClickHouse cloud uses.Tablepsace is 1.6x faster running the benchmark even though we are using a much smaller compute shape.

tinybit_ch• 2 years ago

What's puzzling is ingesting and indexing speed. That part of the test set was 60 times slower than clickhouse. So, whatever Clickhouse takes a day to ingest, Tablespace will take 2 months. Also, massive 13x overhead for storage makes things look even stranger.

All of the above + your benchmark results https://tinyurl.com/4yz87ur4 show that you did trade off visibly improving 9 queries out of 43 at massive expense of disk space and ingest speed. Okay, I guess, maybe there's a usecase for that. But I would not call it a 1.6x speedup over Clickhouse, this is purely misleading.

smythe1234• 2 years ago

Hi there CEO of Tablespace here. I'll address your points. The disk space that Postgres on the Tablespace platform uses is similar to that Vanilla Postgres uses. Also the ingestion time is similar as well - https://n9.cl/g4woz Remember we are still in beta and the indexing time will only be improved as well. We are not optimising for disk space usage, we are optimising execution for speed. Further, although Tablespace uses more disk space as you say, it is still 50% less expensive than ClickHouse Cloud. This cost saving is very conservative as well because users of ClickHouse Cloud still need to maintain a separate transactional database. Tablespace is fully HTAP.

The 1.6x speed-up figure is indeed correct. Have a look at the relative times for Tablespace 1.44 vs. ClickHouse (AWS) 2.34 and ClickHouse (GCP) 2.22 this works out to a 1.6x speed-up.

Show HN: Postgres Columnstore index vs. ClickHouse for OLAP queries

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