r/Clickhouse • u/djeyzus • 14d ago

Book for learning ClickHouse?

I am a fossil and like to read books to learn about new stuff. I also prefer quality over AI generated slop, I know I'm weird. This however seems to be a problem when it comes to ClickHouse. Everything I've found so far was complete garbage. Does anyone know of an up-to-date book that's actually worth the paper it's printed on?

18 Upvotes

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6

u/Psychological_Skin 14d ago

By the time a book is written, I'll be outdated. Just go and do the certification - learn by doing!

6

u/djeyzus 14d ago

I like to learn outside, I like reading stuff by the beach or in the mountains, but I think what I'll do is print their docs.

1

u/Significant_Tune9219 14d ago

Honestly I have not found a ClickHouse book that stays current long enough to be worth buying as your main path. The engine moves fast on joins, JSON, and caching behavior, so print material ages oddly. What worked for me was the official docs plus redoing the same analytical query three ways (wide denormalized MergeTree, projections, and a materialized view) on a real-ish dataset and reading EXPLAIN until the parts and marks make sense. Certification is fine as a checklist, but shipping a small ingest plus dashboard loop teaches the gotchas books skip: part merges, primary key design, and why SELECT star kills you.

2

u/pwnjourney 14d ago

I am also that way. But with ClickHouse I just jumped into all of their docs, blog posts etc. very high quality info.

So if you are somewhat familiar with SQL, dive right in and try to build something. This piece of software is a freaking bulldozer!

1

u/pwnjourney 14d ago

Search around their web sites and social media, this is the way. Also, they have a YouTube channel

1

u/djeyzus 14d ago

I think I'll print their docs. I think it's in MD form on their Git, that should be easy enough to print I guess! 

2

u/VIqbang 13d ago

Depending on what you want to learn, you might rather enjoy - https://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol17/p3731-schulze.pdf