In this blog post, I will talk about archiving MySQL tables in ClickHouse for storage and analytics.

Why Archive?

Hard drives are cheap nowadays, but storing lots of data in MySQL is not practical and can cause all sorts of performance bottlenecks. To name just a few issues:

1. The larger the table and index, the slower the performance of all operations (both writes and reads)
2. Backup and restore for terabytes of data is more challenging, and if we need to have redundancy (replication slave, clustering, etc.) we will have to store all the data N times

The answer is archiving old data. Archiving does not necessarily mean that the data will be permanently removed. Instead, the archived data can be placed into long-term storage (i.e., AWS S3) or loaded into a …