How Physical Intelligence unified its robotics data stack with Postgres managed by ClickHouse

Summary

Physical Intelligence, which builds robotics foundation models, needed a data stack that could support both transactional operations and high-cardinality analytical workloads. Its previous single RDS Postgres instance could not handle those demands, so the team migrated to ClickHouse Cloud and adopted Postgres managed by ClickHouse for OLTP alongside ClickHouse for OLAP. Postgres is automatically replicated into ClickHouse through ClickPipes, while materialized views, full-text indices, and a query agent help researchers search across the company’s data. The resulting stack supports faster, easier exploration as data volume grows from the 10 billion to 100 billion row range, and also handles telemetry through ClickHouse with ClickStack and Grafana.

Takeaways

1. 1

   Postgres managed by ClickHouse combines OLTP and OLAP workloads in one data stack, with Postgres automatically replicated into ClickHouse.

2. 2

   Materialized views and multiple full-text indices support search across robotics data; an agent selects which tables and query approach to use for a request.

3. 3

   Physical Intelligence migrated telemetry to ClickHouse and uses it with ClickStack and Grafana, alongside its transactional and analytical workloads.