Judgment and Trade-offs

Judgment

Build trade-off vocabulary against ClickHouse's real competitors, and practice architecture-level decision-making.

What this module covers

Cloud data warehouses (Snowflake, BigQuery) — cost and latency profile
DuckDB — embedded/local OLAP, when local beats a server
Real-time OLAP siblings — Apache Druid, Apache Pinot
Sampling (SAMPLE clause) as a workload-fit lever
Approximate aggregate functions (trade-off discussion)
Workload-fit decision framework
Sharding (horizontal scale-out) vs. vertical scale-up
Distributed table engine

Lessons