Clickhouse is a relatively new analytics and datawarehouse engine that provides for very quick insertion and analysing of data. Like most analytics platforms it’s built on a column-oriented storage basis and unlike many alternatives is completely open source. It’s also exceedingly fast, even on relatively modest platforms.

Clickhouse does have some differences from some other environments, for example, data inserted cannot easily be updated, and it supports a number of different storage and table engine formats that are used to store and index the information. So how do we get into that from our MySQL transactional store?

Well, you can do dumps and loads, or you could use Tungsten Replicator to do that for you. The techniques I’m going to describe here are not in an active release, but use the same principles as other part of our data loading.

We’re going to use the CSV-based batch loading system that is …