Everything I Learned About ClickHouse was From Real Workloads

Learn ClickHouse fundamentals and advanced optimization techniques through real-world observability workloads in this conference talk. Start with core principles including columnar storage performance advantages, horizontal scaling architecture, and why ClickHouse excels at high-throughput, low-latency analytical queries. Discover how an observability platform successfully ingests and queries billions of logs, traces, and metrics using these foundational concepts. Progress to advanced techniques including custom inverted indexes for rare-event querying, materialized views for real-time aggregations, secondary index tuning, and cost-efficient object storage integration. Gain practical performance optimization strategies tested at scale, learning both fundamental concepts and sophisticated methods developed through years of pushing ClickHouse to its limits in production environments.