---
title: "Settings Overview"
sidebar_position: 1
slug: /en/operations/settings/
---

# Settings Overview

:::note
XML-based Settings Profiles and [configuration files](https://clickhouse.com/docs/en/operations/configuration-files) are currently not supported for ClickHouse Cloud. To specify settings for your ClickHouse Cloud service, you must use [SQL-driven Settings Profiles](https://clickhouse.com/docs/en/operations/access-rights#settings-profiles-management).
:::

There are two main groups of ClickHouse settings:

- Global server settings
- Query-level settings

The main distinction between global server settings and query-level settings is that global server settings must be set in configuration files, while query-level settings can be set in configuration files or with SQL queries.

Read about [global server settings](/docs/en/operations/server-configuration-parameters/settings.md) to learn more about configuring your ClickHouse server at the global server level.

Read about [query-level settings](/docs/en/operations/settings/settings-query-level.md) to learn more about configuring your ClickHouse server at the query level.

## See non-default settings

To view which settings have been changed from their default value:

```sql
SELECT name, value FROM system.settings WHERE changed
```

If you haven't changed any settings from their default value, then ClickHouse will return nothing.

To check the value of a particular setting, specify the `name` of the setting in your query:

```sql
SELECT name, value FROM system.settings WHERE name = 'max_threads'
```

This command should return something like:

```response
┌─name────────┬─value─────┐
│ max_threads │ 'auto(8)' │
└─────────────┴───────────┘

1 row in set. Elapsed: 0.002 sec.
```