June 19, 2026
Birthday cake, but make it drama
Ten years of ClickHouse in open source
ClickHouse turns 10 as fans rave, rivals get side-eyed, and one gripe steals the thread
TLDR: ClickHouse marked 10 years as an open-source data tool and used the moment to boast about building everything in public. Commenters mostly cheered it as fast, useful, and underrated, but one sharp complaint about keeping a prized feature out of the free version added just enough drama to spice up the party.
A database birthday post somehow turned into a mini comment-section talent show. ClickHouse is celebrating 10 years in open source, with founder Alexey Milovidov proudly framing it as not just public code, but a project built in full view of everyone: open plans, open reviews, open testing, and thousands of contributors. In plain English, the pitch is: this isn’t just software you can use, it’s software you can watch being built.
But the real sparkle came from the crowd. The warm-and-fuzzy camp showed up fast, with users calling ClickHouse a “pleasant experience” and a “powerhouse” for digging through huge piles of company data. One commenter practically gave it a makeover montage, saying replacing another tool finally made their setup feel “right.” Another dropped the ultimate indie-tech compliment: ClickHouse is the “low key amazing tech people are busy using instead of posting about.” Translation: the cool kids’ secret is out.
Then came the drama. A longtime user of a competing system basically waved a breakup letter in public, calling ClickHouse a “breath of fresh air” after years of pain elsewhere. Ouch. And just when the party looked too polished, one critic crashed in with a pointed complaint that ClickHouse is “gatekeeping” an important high-availability feature from the free version. So yes, it’s anniversary cake on one side, licensing side-eye on the other. Classic open-source birthday energy: applause, shade, and one very specific grudge.
Key Points
- •ClickHouse’s open-source release anniversary is dated in the article to June 15, 2016, making the post a 10-year retrospective published on June 15, 2026.
- •The article states that ClickHouse has become the most popular open source analytical database and has more than 2,000 contributors.
- •Alexey Milovidov outlines four levels of open source, ranging from publicly readable code to fully transparent development processes.
- •ClickHouse is described as aiming for the highest level of openness, including public contribution rules, roadmap, testing, CI, release cycle, support, and documentation.
- •The repository is presented as both a learning resource for C++ development and a testing ground for experimental work on performance-related components such as allocators, compression libraries, hash tables, data formats, and sorting algorithms.