ClickHouse processes typical analytical queries two to three orders of magnitude faster than traditional row-oriented systems with the same available I/O throughput and CPU capacity. Columnar storage format allows fitting more hot data in RAM, which leads to shorter typical response times.
Total cost of ownership could be further lowered by using commodity hardware with rotating disk drives instead of enterprise grade NVMe or SSD without significant sacrifices in latency for most kinds of queries.
Vectorized query execution involves relevant SIMD processor instructions and runtime code generation. Processing data in columns increases CPU line cache hit rate.
ClickHouse minimizes the number of seeks for range queries, which increases the efficiency of using rotational disk drives, as it maintains locality of reference for continually stored data.
ClickHouse enables companies to manage their data and create reports without using specialized networks that are aimed at high-performance computing.