pg_clickhouse v0.10: Subquery pushdown and 1000x faster TPC-H queries

This database update is insanely faster, but the comments got petty fast

TLDR: ClickHouse says its latest pg_clickhouse update makes some database tasks dramatically faster, including one dropping from 32.7 seconds to 37 milliseconds. Commenters immediately split between roasting the blog’s corporate-AI phrasing and demanding a tougher comparison against rival project pgrust.

ClickHouse dropped a flashy new update for pg_clickhouse, saying some benchmark tests now run up to 1,000 times faster than before. The biggest flex is one test query that crashed from a painful 32.7 seconds to just 37 milliseconds—basically from “go make coffee” to “you blinked and missed it.” Even better for the company, it now handles more of the work remotely instead of bouncing data around inefficiently. For regular people: the software got dramatically better at answering certain big data questions fast.

But the real fun was in the community reaction, where the applause immediately turned into nitpicking, side-eye, and rival-company energy. One commenter completely ignored the speed boost to roast the writing style instead, mocking the phrase “move the needle” as suspiciously artificial and saying it sounded like something an AI would blurt out. In classic internet fashion, the giant technical achievement was briefly upstaged by a mini-drama over corporate wording.

Then came the competitive stirring: another commenter pushed the team to compare this project with pgrust, basically saying, “Cool numbers, now fight someone your own size.” That turned the mood from celebration into benchmark politics, where every big claim instantly gets met with demands for a head-to-head showdown. So yes, the update is fast—but the comments prove that in tech, the speed record is only half the story; the other half is everyone arguing about how you described it.

Key Points

  • pg_clickhouse v0.10.0 increases fully pushed-down TPC-H queries from 12 of 22 to 16 of 22.
  • The release adds a rebuilt binary driver based on a new plain-C client library, expands pushdown coverage for functions and aggregates, and includes concurrency hardening.
  • TPC-H Q2 improved from 3,446 ms in pg_clickhouse 0.3 to 24 ms in pg_clickhouse 0.10, and Q17 improved from 32,709 ms to 37 ms.
  • The article highlights Q17 as a correlated subquery case where full pushdown makes pg_clickhouse faster than PostgreSQL's reported 2.1-second plan.
  • Six TPC-H queries remain not fully pushed down: Q13, Q15, Q16, Q18, Q20, and Q21, with current blockers tied to deparser handling of joins on both sides of anti/semi-joins.

Hottest takes

"LLMs sure love throwing in archaic expressions" — manbash
"move the needle" — manbash
"Please consider comparing pg_clickhouse to pgrust" — manjose2018
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