Using ClickHouse is one of the best decisions we've made here at PostHog. It has allowed us to scale performance all while allowing us to build more products on the same set of data.
Since we've been using ClickHouse long before this JSON functionality was available (or even before the earlier version of this called `Object('json')` was avaiable) we ended up setting up a job that would materialize json fields out of a json blob and into materialized columns based on query patterns against the keys in the JSON blob. Then, once those materialized columns were created we would just route the queries to those columns at runtime if they were available. This saved us a _ton_ on CPU and IO utilization. Even though ClickHouse uses some really fast SIMD JSON functions, the best way to make a computer go faster is to make the computer do less and this new JSON type does exactly that and it's so turn key!
The team over at ClickHouse Inc. as well as the community behind it moves surprisingly fast. I can't recommend it enough and excited for everything else that is on the roadmap here. I'm really excited for what is on the horizon with Parquet and Iceberg support.
Since we've been using ClickHouse long before this JSON functionality was available (or even before the earlier version of this called `Object('json')` was avaiable) we ended up setting up a job that would materialize json fields out of a json blob and into materialized columns based on query patterns against the keys in the JSON blob. Then, once those materialized columns were created we would just route the queries to those columns at runtime if they were available. This saved us a _ton_ on CPU and IO utilization. Even though ClickHouse uses some really fast SIMD JSON functions, the best way to make a computer go faster is to make the computer do less and this new JSON type does exactly that and it's so turn key!
https://posthog.com/handbook/engineering/databases/materiali...
The team over at ClickHouse Inc. as well as the community behind it moves surprisingly fast. I can't recommend it enough and excited for everything else that is on the roadmap here. I'm really excited for what is on the horizon with Parquet and Iceberg support.