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Andy Pavlo joins ClickHouse to establish ClickHouse Labs
- throwaw12 2mo agoThat's great news for Clickhouse and for Andy I guess, they are both obsessed with databases and are at the cutting edge.
- tomsanbear 2mo agoAlways enjoyed his lecture series from CMU, hopefully those continue in a sponsored format from Clickhouse.
- apavlo 2mo agoThey will continue. New seminar series starts next month (announcement coming this week).
- AbbeFaria 2mo agoI “audited” CMU 15-445 in April 2026, a few months ago. I then applied to Azure Hyperscale DB team, and as my pitch to get hired I cold DM’d the hiring manager whatever I finished in the assignments (BPM, Concurrent B-tree, Transaction support etc). With that, I was able to get the interview although I ended up failing it. My lack of experience in C++ was probably one of the main reasons. Your course helped me stand my own during the interview and even though I had zero database experience apart from finishing the course, I felt adequately prepared. Thank you for making the course open source. As a working professional, it was helpful to be able to do the course on my own time. Suffice to say, I am a big fan of your work and thank you for introducing me (and other fellow learners) to the interesting world of Databases!
- shimman 2mo agoWhy did you think it was appropriate to nag the hiring manager while you finished a MOOC?
- strbean 2mo agoI read it as "After finishing the course, I DM'd the hiring manager with a list of the stuff I did for the course."
- fragmede 2mo agoWhat's the hiring manager's job? Hiring people? Why would that be inappropriate?
- AbbeFaria 2mo agoI know it’s a troll, This was no MOOC. I didn’t even get a certificate. I saw the job opening in the careers portal and just cold DM’d the HM. As to why I DM’d, what do I have to lose ? I was already working at MSFT in a different team. The worst that could happen was that he would just ignore the message. Also, I didn’t nag the HM, it was just one DM where I summarised the things I did in the course. He then asked me to send me my resume and that was it.
- ibgeek 2mo agoWill you maintain a connection to CMU? If so, what will you continue doing and at what percent of effort?
- coolThingsFirst 2mo agoYour DB course is phenomenal. Thank you very much for making it available to all of us!
- sghiassy 2mo agoClickhouse Labs is a research lab for ClickHouse’s engineers and their db product? Whatever floats your boat. Sounds like you just work as an engineer at a db company
- lumost 2mo agoDeep tech fields have a more complex relationship with academia than other industries. Engineers often need license to test ideas that may not see adoption for years, or require tens of millions to build-out. A "research" arm is exactly this license, although it comes at the cost of potentially killing innovation in the rest of the company.
- ForHackernews 2mo agoC'mon, databases are great but they are not in any way a "deep tech" field. Databases exist today in a zillion production forms as commercial products and free software. Deep tech includes things like nuclear fusion, solid state batteries, quantum computers. I know everyone wants to feel cool, but just because your new javascript framework will be in beta for the next ten years doesn't make it "deep tech".
- lumost 2mo agoI'd ascribe "deep tech" to anything that you can reasonably get a PhD in and have it not be unusual. There are dozens of academic conferences on DBs pushing the frontier forward.
- ForHackernews 2mo agoI'm very excited to keep pushing the frontiers of deep tech art history, just as soon as I complete my $150M Series B raise.
- wbl 2mo agoThey use cyclotrons with some regularity and advanced imaging techniques.
- pphysch 2mo ago> The goal of ClickHouse Labs is to establish a best-in-class industry research organization focused on databases. It will not operate as an isolated research organization that throws ideas over the wall to engineering. Instead, we will work closely with ClickHouse engineers, customers, collaborators, and industry partners to develop and disseminate new ideas that keep ClickHouse at the bleeding edge. This is cool, though bittersweet that the public research infrastructure (universities) is not really configured to support this kind of high-impact research any more.
- Ar-Curunir 2mo agoWhat do you mean? There’s plenty of high impact research on databases happening in academia. (Including, for example, Andy’s group at CMU) Also keep in mind that the part you quoted is partially marketing copy.
- bootwoot 2mo agoI take this announcement to mean he is leaving. So he's a perfect example
- kenferry 2mo agoThere are areas of academia where I definitely worry about this kind of thing, but not really database research (and in general CS is a lot less worrisome than most fields). It's a good thing when industry is a competitively attractive environment for research, which is how I read this.
- danlark1 2mo agoCongrats, that's incredible news. Watched apavlo@'s lectures while studying in the university and finished my bachelor thesis implementing features and doing research at ClickHouse. Surprised to see these worlds being together now!
- adrianco 2mo agoHi Andy, that’s very cool news. Will you be at the HPTS workshop in October?
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- astrange 2mo ago> ClickHouse had features that at the time were only found in a handful of closed-source, commercial analytical DBMSs. For example, ClickHouse was written in C++ and supported vectorized query execution using SIMD in 2016. Most prominent open-source analytical DBMSs in 2016 were JVM-based and did not support SIMD optimizations until years later. Performance is a feature. "Written in C++" is a strange idea of a feature.
- bijowo1676 2mo agozero cost abstraction is one of the many features of C++, its just you are not familiar with the language
- astrange 2mo agoI am familiar with C++.
- nikhilsimha 2mo agoCongrats! Andy is incredible!
- gavinray 2mo agoClickhouse just became the hottest talent-attraction on the market. Congrats Andy, hope you enjoy the ride =)
- a34729t 2mo agoI'm very curious about the convergence of the best in class fast OLAP products (StarRocks, ClickHouse) with Trino. It sounds like everybody is going for decoupled compute/storage, using S3 or similar as the storage layer, and thus forgoing colocated joins (ok I know ClickHouse joins suck)... So what does this mean for ingestion (and indexing)? Iceberg V3? Paimon? Bespoke ingestion through the DB engine to do the indexing?
- mrits 2mo agoClickhouse joins have been improving almost every month for the last couple of years. Maybe they still suck but a lot less
- jimmyl02 2mo agoIt's also interesting how Clickhouse / Starrocks can now also act as a query planner and executor on top of non-native formats (ex. Iceberg). I assume the native formats will always be faster / more optimized but the need for Trino as a separate executor while running either of these databases seems to be close to gone.
- a34729t 2mo agoThe benefit of StarRocks/ClickHouse over Trino is that you get secondary indices, but that means you have to do the indexing somehow. Native format is faster (especially for colocated joins), but it's way more expensive if you have to run a bunch of separate storage nodes vs just using S3, especially your query volume isn't that high. I liken it to the BigQuery cost model, where storage is effectively free.
- hodgesrm 2mo ago> I assume the native formats will always be faster / more optimized Actually query on Iceberg is end-to-end faster on ClickHouse than MergeTree native format on disk. It's mostly a matter of how much compute you throw at it. Native MergeTree still wins in cases that depend on use of indexes to reduce I/O but scan speed is no longer an issue.
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- Tostino 2mo agoHope it goes well for you Andy. Have loved your lectures over the years. Best of luck!
- remywang 2mo agoLooks like Andy's here, so if you see this - please also try to convince ClickHouse to consider funding DB research in academia. With all the money being poured into AI and the chaos in government funding, there is almost nothing for DB research anymore.
- apavlo 2mo agoRemy - Good to hear from you. Yes things are mess right now. Let me get settled with setting up the lab and we'll figure out how we want to engage with academia.
- sigbottle 2mo agoYooo is this the CMU funny guy?
- bhickey 2mo agoAndy taught me a lot about trolling. I also hear he's banned from every post office within 50 miles of Baltimore.
- mkw5053 2mo agoOk now I need to know.
- bhickey 2mo agoAndy was a PhD student at Brown when I was an undergrad. Once he hired a magician off of Craigslist for a departmental event. The guy showed up drunk and lost his bird in the building.
- bhickey 2mo agoOr the time he ran BitTorrent-over-MediaWiki and made a number of people very angry. https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/01e4/ecb5a12b6735dd0344d888ef45d10701d288.pdf https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/01e4/ecb5a12b6735dd0344d888...
- adi2907 2mo agoIts refreshing to see corporate research labs in a non AI area. Clickhouse has been a huge beneficiary of the AI wave and its good to see some of the value going into advancing fundamental research in infrastructure
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- codedump 2mo ago[dead]
- HackerThemAll 2mo agoAndy, go ahead and correct the https://dbdb.io/db/bigquery https://dbdb.io/db/bigquery How did you come to the conclusion that BigQuery's data model is "Document / XML" :joy: This entry is not only wrong, it's way outdated, therefore misinforming. I'm wondering about the overall quality of this dbdb.io database at large.
- apavlo 2mo agoThere are several out of date entries in there. We used to have students help with writing entries. I just did a major refresh of the site this summer. I need to go through all the entries and figure out how to update them.
- jefecoon 2mo agoAndy, you had me at KillerMike + El-P super group. Best of luck running the jewels on the dbase world with CH