---
title: "What a difference 10 years of open source makes"
description: "ClickHouse marks ten years since becoming open source under the Apache 2.0 license, crediting more than 2,600 contributors and a decade of monthly releases for its growth into one of the world’s most widely deployed analytical databases. Recent engineering work spans joins, updates and deletes, JSON, full-text search, vector search, query acceleration, integrations, and developer tooling. Join-focused changes made the TPC-H SF100 workload 26× faster between versions 22.4 and 26.4, while statistics-based reordering reduced one six-table query from 3,903.7 seconds to 2.7 seconds. The project also publishes open benchmarks, including ClickBench, JSONBench, CostBench, and PostgresBench, with scripts, configurations, data, and results intended for independent validation. Its next phase continues to emphasize community contributions and broader ways to use ClickHouse."
---

# What a difference 10 years of open source makes

[Clickhouse](https://yomu.fyi/company/clickhouse) · Jun 16, 2026

**Type:** Explainer

## Summary

ClickHouse marks ten years since becoming open source under the Apache 2.0 license, crediting more than 2,600 contributors and a decade of monthly releases for its growth into one of the world’s most widely deployed analytical databases. Recent engineering work spans joins, updates and deletes, JSON, full-text search, vector search, query acceleration, integrations, and developer tooling. Join-focused changes made the TPC-H SF100 workload 26× faster between versions 22.4 and 26.4, while statistics-based reordering reduced one six-table query from 3,903.7 seconds to 2.7 seconds. The project also publishes open benchmarks, including ClickBench, JSONBench, CostBench, and PostgresBench, with scripts, configurations, data, and results intended for independent validation. Its next phase continues to emphasize community contributions and broader ways to use ClickHouse.

## Context

ClickHouse’s tenth anniversary provides a retrospective on how an open-source project released under the Apache 2.0 license developed through community contributions and monthly releases. The source presents the project’s accumulated engineering progress, adoption indicators, and open benchmarking practices.

## Approach / What changed

The project advanced through continued engine optimization and new capabilities, including join algorithms and optimizer reordering, patch parts for SQL updates, columnar JSON, inverted indexes for full-text search, HNSW and QBit vector search, lazy materialization, query condition caching, projections, parallel replicas, and integrations such as SQL dialect support, WebAssembly UDFs, PromQL, and pg\_clickhouse. It also publishes benchmark data, schemas, queries, scripts, and results for independent reproduction.

## Takeaways

- Focused join engineering made ClickHouse 26× faster on the join-heavy TPC-H SF100 workload between versions 22.4 and 26.4; one six-table query improved from 3,903.7 seconds to 2.7 seconds after statistics-based join reordering.
- Patch parts make standard SQL UPDATE and DELETE operations possible without rewriting entire columns; on a 600-million-row benchmark, bulk updates were 1,700× faster and single-row updates up to 2,400× faster than classic mutations.
- ClickHouse’s benchmark suite publishes workloads, schemas, scripts, configurations, and raw results, covering analytical databases, JSON, cost-performance, and managed Postgres so others can run and validate the comparisons.

**Tags:** [Open Source](https://yomu.fyi/topic/open-source), [Performance](https://yomu.fyi/topic/performance), [Postgres](https://yomu.fyi/topic/postgres), [Search](https://yomu.fyi/topic/search)

- Source: [Clickhouse](https://clickhouse.com/blog/what-a-difference-10-years-of-open-source-makes)
- Source URL: https://clickhouse.com/blog/what-a-difference-10-years-of-open-source-makes
- Ingested by Yomu: 2026-08-29T01:35:19.263Z

[Read original post](https://clickhouse.com/blog/what-a-difference-10-years-of-open-source-makes)