December 25, 2025
Peanut Butter & Query
Lessons from a year of Postgres CDC in production
ClickHouse’s Postgres sync hits GA after PeerDB—fans cheer, skeptics yell “marketing”
TLDR: ClickHouse’s Postgres change‑data‑capture, powered by PeerDB, is now fully released and used by 400 companies moving 200 TB monthly. Commenters are split: fans love the open‑source/managed combo and speed, while critics question marketing charts, reliability vs Debezium, and lock‑in—key debates for real‑time analytics builders.
ClickHouse just spent a year turning its “Postgres → ClickHouse” data sync (aka CDC—change data capture) from private preview to full release, powered by the PeerDB acquisition. The post flexes numbers—400 companies, 200 TB/month—and a promise: keep PeerDB open‑source while ClickPipes is the managed version. See: ClickHouse and Postgres.
The crowd? Split. Fans cheered “finally, a sane split: Postgres for transactions, ClickHouse for analytics.” Skeptics rolled in with marketing bingo and side-eye at a chart comparing PeerDB GitHub activity to Debezium: “Commits aren’t war stories.” Another thread argued vendor lock‑in vs the openness claim, with folks asking if improvements truly flow back to the community.
Engineers aired the gritty stuff: schema changes, late events, duplicates, and privacy. One meme: CDC = Can’t Delete Completely when sensitive data sneaks into analytics. Others protested that Postgres extensions aren’t “that bad,” accusing the post of dunking on them; ClickHouse stans replied with speed gifs and “OLTP vs OLAP, learn it.”
Jokes flew about ClickPipes being “ClickHype,” and the “100× growth” translating to “from 4 to 400—math checks, vibe doesn’t.” The calm middle weighed in: if PeerDB stays modular and open, this could be the peanut‑butter‑and‑jelly of data stacks. But the room’s split: hype vs hard ops.
Key Points
- •ClickHouse’s Postgres CDC connector in ClickHouse Cloud (via ClickPipes) moved from private preview to public beta and reached GA in May.
- •ClickHouse acquired PeerDB in July 2024 and integrated it within four months as the engine powering the connector.
- •PeerDB remains open source and modular, with improvements in ClickPipes flowing back to the OSS project.
- •Adoption grew nearly 100× post-acquisition, with over 400 companies replicating 200+ TB of Postgres data to ClickHouse monthly.
- •A key use case is real-time customer-facing analytics, where Postgres becomes slow at scale and ClickHouse is used to offload analytics.