July 2026 newsletter

Summary

The July 2026 newsletter rounds up ClickHouse releases, community projects, benchmarks, engineering work, and upcoming events in real-time data warehousing. Version 26.6 adds hypothetical skip indexes, cascading refreshable materialized-view dependencies, experimental continuous queries, AI embedding functions, PNG output, CLI documentation, and geospatial improvements. A CostBench comparison running the full analytics path over 28 hours found better cost-performance for ClickHouse Cloud than Snowflake Interactive Tables, which required a continuously running refresh warehouse for pre-aggregated data. Other features cover conversational analytics with ClickHouse Cloud, LibreChat, and MCP; Postgres change-data capture through Debezium and Kafka; local agent queries with chDB; high-concurrency tuning; and Silk, whose fiber runtime targets lower I/O tail latency. Quick reads report ingestion, caching, security, and multi-tenant SQL developments.

Takeaways

1. 1

   Hypothetical skip indexes show whether adding a skip index could improve query performance without actually building the index.

2. 2

   CostBench measures continuous ingestion, data maintenance, freshness, and query execution; over 28 hours, ClickHouse delivered better cost-performance than Snowflake Interactive Tables.

3. 3

   Silk combines a NUMA-aware work-stealing scheduler with io_uring and zero heap allocation on the hot path, reporting 3.6-nanosecond fiber yields and 5.9 million file IOPS.