August 3, 2026
Lab coat or corporate makeover?
Andy Pavlo Joins ClickHouse to Establish ClickHouse Labs
Database professor jumps to ClickHouse and the comments are already fighting about it
TLDR: Andy Pavlo is joining ClickHouse to start ClickHouse Labs, a new team meant to turn research ideas into real database products. Fans are thrilled by the professor-company crossover, but skeptics are already asking whether this is a true research lab or just engineering with fancier branding.
The big news is that database professor and online lecture favorite Andy Pavlo is leaving academia part-time glory for ClickHouse, where he’ll launch a new research group called ClickHouse Labs. In plain English: he’s teaming up with a company known for very fast data tools to turn big ideas into real products. Pavlo says he once thought ClickHouse sounded too good to be true, and now he’s helping shape its future. That alone had the community doing a double take.
But the real action was in the reactions. One camp was basically throwing confetti: longtime viewers of Pavlo’s CMU lectures called it a dream crossover, with one commenter saying they were "surprised to see these worlds being together now!" Another summed it up like a fan wedding: ClickHouse and Pavlo are both obsessed with databases and "at the cutting edge."
Then came the side-eye. The hottest skeptical take? Is "ClickHouse Labs" really a grand research lab… or just a fancy title for doing engineering inside a database company? Ouch. That comment brought the thread’s only real drama, poking at whether this is moonshot science or corporate rebranding with extra sparkle. Meanwhile, the softer, sweeter concern was hilariously relatable: will the lectures continue? For a lot of fans, the real stakes aren’t corporate strategy at all—they just don’t want their favorite professor to disappear behind a company login.
Key Points
- •Andy Pavlo announced he is joining ClickHouse to establish and lead a new research group called ClickHouse Labs.
- •Pavlo said he has followed ClickHouse since its 2016 open-source launch and viewed it as technically advanced for supporting C++ implementation and SIMD-based vectorized query execution early on.
- •ClickHouse Labs is intended to function as an industry database research organization that works closely with engineers, customers, collaborators, and industry partners.
- •The lab will also work with ClickHouse’s PostgreSQL team, with research spanning both transactional and analytical database workloads.
- •Pavlo said an immediate priority is to help validate engineering ideas and optimizations more quickly and push the strongest ones toward production, building on ClickHouse’s existing technical publications including a 2024 VLDB paper.