How Vibe.co handles billions of ad impressions with ClickHouse Cloud

Summary

Vibe.co, recently acquired by Walmart, uses ClickHouse Cloud to provide real-time campaign reporting for thousands of Connected TV advertisers across billions of ad impressions. It migrated from Postgres after aggregation-heavy OLAP queries made its pre-aggregation layer a bottleneck, limiting interactive slicing and requiring new jobs for reporting use cases. The team evaluated self-hosted ClickHouse, another managed option, and ClickHouse Cloud, choosing the latter for operational simplicity, support from ClickHouse engineers, and separation of storage and compute with more predictable costs. Vibe uses refreshable materialized views for hot/cold tiering, keeping the last 30 days in a hot table; stored data grew from about 100 GB to over 2 TB without rearchitecting, while more than 90% of client campaign reports respond in under 100ms.

Takeaways

1. 1

   Postgres became a bottleneck for Vibe’s aggregation-heavy OLAP queries over billions of rows, making the pre-aggregation layer increasingly fragile and costly to extend.

2. 2

   Vibe evaluated self-hosted ClickHouse, another managed option, and ClickHouse Cloud; it accepted the operational tradeoff of managed infrastructure to avoid allocating engineering resources to database operations.

3. 3

   A hot table covering the last 30 days sits in front of the full historical dataset, helping more than 90% of client campaign reports return in under 100ms.