Skip to content
Watasu Docs

ClickHouse

ClickHouse is Watasu’s analytical database. Reach for it when you have lots of append-only data and you want to slice and aggregate it fast.

Don’t use it as a replacement for PostgreSQL — it’s not built for OLTP workloads and you’ll hate it for that.

Good fits

Section titled “Good fits”
  • product analytics events
  • audit logs at scale
  • time-series data
  • dashboards over millions or billions of rows
  • exploratory analytics where wide aggregations need to return in seconds

Plan tiers

Section titled “Plan tiers”

Three tiers with a real operational gap between Hobby and Standard:

  • Hobby 0–2 — single node, network-backed storage, no replication. Explicitly non-production; manual backups only. For development, exploration, and small staging.
  • Standard 0–2 — 1 shard × 2 replicas across two German zones, local NVMe, scheduled backups by default.
  • Premium 0–2 — multi-shard with 2 replicas per shard, distributed tables across the same two zones, local NVMe, scheduled backups.

Hobby → Standard isn’t just bigger; it’s a fundamentally different topology (single-node → replicated) and a different storage backend (network PVC → local NVMe).

Create

Section titled “Create”
Terminal window
watasu addons:create clickhouse --app my-app

After attachment, your app receives ClickHouse connection details as config vars. Use any standard ClickHouse client library.

Open an interactive session

Section titled “Open an interactive session”
Terminal window
watasu clickhouse:cli --app my-app

Backups

Section titled “Backups”

ClickHouse supports manual backups, scheduled backups on supported plans, and restore from managed backups or uploaded archives.

Capture

Section titled “Capture”
Terminal window
watasu addons:backups:capture analytics-db

Restore

Section titled “Restore”
Terminal window
watasu addons:restore analytics-db ./warehouse-backup.zip --name analytics-db-restored
watasu addons:promote analytics-db-restored

See Backups and Restores for the full workflow.

Tips

Section titled “Tips”
  • Keep ClickHouse separate from your transactional database. Mixing dashboards and OLTP on one engine ends badly for both.
  • Validate your restore process before you need it. ClickHouse archives can be large and surprises during an incident are expensive.
  • Pre-aggregate where possible — ClickHouse loves materialized views.