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Connect on SlackIf you work in the data engineering and infrastructure space, you know that choosing the right analytical database is important. Few things can impact the quality of your work (and your general happiness) like building on top of the wrong database. The best way to avoid future headaches is with a thorough evaluation process that ensures the solution you select for your business adequately meets your needs.
Unfortunately, evaluations can be quite time consuming, and you have limited time to make a decision in most cases. How can you be sure you're even looking at the right solutions? This article will take a look at one such approach to accelerating your search for the right solution: ClickBench.
Comparing Analytics Databases
Traditionally, benchmark reports, industry press coverage, and even forum posts have been a useful way to quickly understand your options, but this can also be demanding on your time. Recognizing this challenge, more and more benchmarking and comparison tools are starting to show up. These software tools and websites make it easy to pull key performance metrics and product features together to quickly identify solutions worth your time evaluating. One such solution is ClickBench, a comparison tool that offers a rather exhaustive list of the top analytical databases available today.
What is ClickBench?
Launched in 2022, ClickBench is a free-to-use benchmarking tool built and maintained by the team behind ClickHouse. Designed to help users quickly compare both open-source and proprietary analytical databases, ClickBench has grown in popularity thanks to its well-maintained (and growing) list of databases available for comparison.
For testing purposes, the benchmark offered by ClickBench includes:
A dataset that contains a flat table with exactly 99,997,497 records.
43 queries that cover a range of data analytics use cases with a flat table schema.
ClickBench is a breeze to test with as well. According to its maintainers, benchmarking a system end-to-end with ClickBench should take less than 20 minutes.
ClickBench also comes with an easy-to-use interactive dashboard, which not only gives users a way to compare the performances of different databases with a few simple clicks of the mouse, but also provides an opportunity for users to discover new solutions that they may not have been aware of. The ClickHouse team has put together a really great tool for performance comparisons, and its popularity is well-deserved, but there are some things users should know before they start using ClickBench in their evaluation process.
How ClickBench Works
Thanks to its user-friendly dashboard, ClickBench has a pretty flat learning curve. Although simple, it does not fully replace the evaluations one would do when looking for new solutions. It's important to know what ClickBench should be used for and what it can't tell you.
What ClickBench Can Tell You
ClickBench provides users with a fast and simple way to view and reproduce the ranking of databases by analytics performance (i.e., query speed). The results are based on a predefined dataset and a collection of queries, so while ClickBench can't be used to evaluate based on your specific scenarios, it can be very useful for:
Quickly building your shortlist of databases for further evaluation.
Discovering new solutions that offer superior performance you may not have known about.
Developing a general sense of who the current leaders are when it comes to database performance.
ClickBench's flexibility in filtering results by hardware configurations, software versions, and even cluster size, means it can still provide some useful metrics even if the benchmark is not built on your specific business scenarios.