Andy Pavlo joins ClickHouse to establish ClickHouse Labs

Summary

Andy Pavlo announces that he is joining ClickHouse to establish and lead ClickHouse Labs, an industry research team focused on database systems. He describes ClickHouse’s early use of C++ and vectorized query execution with SIMD in 2016, and says its development has remained relevant to his academic research. Labs will work directly with ClickHouse engineers, customers, collaborators, and industry partners rather than operating separately, while also collaborating with the PostgreSQL team on performance and reliability for its managed service. An immediate priority is validating and pushing an existing backlog of ideas and optimizations into production, followed by research into hardware, algorithms, data structures, execution strategies, and DBMS development for AI and agentic workloads. The stated aim is to combine scientific research with technology that matters to users.

Takeaways

1. 1

   ClickHouse Labs is designed to connect scientific database research directly with engineering, customers, collaborators, and industry partners rather than throwing ideas over the wall.

2. 2

   An immediate priority is accelerating the validation of ClickHouse engineering ideas and optimizations that have not yet been fully pushed into production.

3. 3

   The research agenda includes how databases can support AI and agents, and how agents might improve or automate DBMS development itself.