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GitTrends: A Google Trends style view of the GitHub ecosystem
Lionel Palacin
- Source
- Clickhouse
- Published
- Added to Yomu
Summary
GitHub produces billions of events across issues, pull requests, and comments, but turning this vast stream into a real-time trends analyzer presents significant technical challenges. GitTrends is an open-source demo application designed to search and compare technology keywords across nearly ten billion GitHub events. Built to showcase the full-text search capabilities recently released in ClickHouse, the application indexes raw text without pre-computed answers or intermediate data transformation. ClickHouse executes full-text searches and aggregations within a single engine in one pass, eliminating cross-system joins and data movement. The demo includes live comparisons toggling between full-text search, bloom filters, and full table scans to illustrate query performance at scale.
Context
Capturing GitHub's continuous stream of billions of issues, pull requests, and comments to analyze technology lifecycles and keyword trends in real time without heavy pre-computation is difficult.
Approach / What changed
ClickHouse indexes raw text directly using its new full-text search index feature, enabling simultaneous raw text searches and aggregations across nearly 10 billion GitHub events in a single query pass without cross-system data movement.
Takeaways
- ClickHouse combines full-text search and analytical aggregation in the same engine, executing queries in a single pass without moving data between systems.
- GitTrends lets users toggle between full-text search, bloom filters, and full table scans to compare query performance on raw GitHub event data.
- GitHub Events API payload changes starting in October 2025 altered certain fields, affecting historical trend accuracy across the complete dataset.