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Aiven for ClickHouse®

Aiven for ClickHouse® is a fully managed distributed columnar database service based on the open source ClickHouse engine. It is designed for online analytical processing (OLAP), data warehousing, and real-time analytics that require fast SQL queries on large datasets.

ClickHouse is optimized for analytical workloads. Unlike transactional (OLTP) databases that prioritize frequent row-level updates, ClickHouse is built for complex read queries and large-scale aggregations across millions or billions of rows.

ClickHouse uses a columnar storage model. Data is stored by column instead of by row, so queries read only the columns required for a specific operation. This reduces disk I/O, improves compression efficiency, and accelerates aggregation queries. For more on how ClickHouse indexes and processes data, see Indexing and data processing.

Aiven manages infrastructure, configuration, upgrades, and maintenance so you can focus on working with your data.

When to use Aiven for ClickHouse®​

Aiven for ClickHouse is suitable for workloads such as:

  • Event and log analytics
  • Time-series data analysis
  • Reporting and dashboards
  • Large-scale aggregations
  • Real-time analytics pipelines
  • Data warehousing

These workloads typically involve fewer updates and more large read and aggregation operations. Aiven for ClickHouse is not intended for high-frequency transactional applications that require frequent row-level updates.

Service management​

Aiven provisions and manages your ClickHouse cluster, including:

  • Service provisioning
  • Cluster configuration
  • Software updates
  • Infrastructure maintenance

Each service runs as a distributed, fault-tolerant cluster. Configuration defaults are applied based on the selected service plan.

Scalability​

You can scale your service as data volume and query requirements grow:

  • Scale vertically by changing the service plan
  • Scale horizontally using shards and distributed tables

Aiven supports rolling maintenance updates. You can configure maintenance windows to control when updates occur.

For more information, see:

Backups and recovery​

Aiven for ClickHouse includes automatic backups. Backup retention depends on the selected service plan.

You can restore a service from a backup or fork a service to create a new independent service from the latest backup. Forking is useful for testing upgrades, schema changes, or performance validation.

For details, see Service forking.

Monitoring​

Aiven provides service metrics and logs.

You can integrate with:

  • Aiven for Grafana®
  • Aiven for Metrics
  • Aiven for OpenSearch®
  • Prometheus
  • AWS CloudWatch
  • Google Cloud Logging

For details, see Monitor Aiven for ClickHouse metrics.

Security and network access​

Each service runs on isolated infrastructure.

The Aiven platform supports:

  • TLS-encrypted connections
  • VPC peering
  • PrivateLink connectivity

For configuration steps, see Secure a managed ClickHouse® service.

Automation​

You can manage Aiven for ClickHouse using:

Most operations available in the Aiven Console are also available through the CLI and API.

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