Last time I looked at TimescaleDB a few months ago, it appeared to me that you had to ingest data into what they call an access node, which made it a non-starter for our use case, but matched perfectly with ClickHouse, which is a symmetric deployment, where every node can be an ingest node.
You are correct. The current multi-node deployment (if you need it for your workload) does have one "managing" access node. All ANs and DNs can be replicated and configured with tooling such as patroni for HA.
We have a few users that have larger multi-node clusters setup this way (one at 40+ nodes so far) and happy with the offering overall. Obviously YMMV depending on requirements/IT support.
Hmm, considering after 2 years of shipping Druid as part of a big data analytics product, my company is moving off of Druid because of performance and stability issues, I don't think my company, at least, would consider Druid a success at all.
We are moving to Vertica, because other products in our company use that, although I'd have liked if we had gone to ClickHouse, which is faster than Vertica and Druid for our product.
I have worked with Druid and ClickHouse extensively in the past year.
I do think rebalancing is a weak point for ClickHouse, although for our use case that would not be so much of an issue, and it feels like it is on the roadmap for ClickHouse this year, but we will see. And if you are on Kubernetes, some of that headache may be handled for you with the ClickHouse Kubernetes operator.
I will say, that Druid indexing comes at a heavy cost in hardware for ingestion.
We find ClickHouse can easily ingest at least 3x the rate of Druid on the same hardware, and since Druid is asymmetric in design, you then have to get even more hardware to handle the queries.
Even with the vectorized aggregation, ClickHouse is beating Druid for full table scans at least, especially high cardinality data. But the vectorized aggregation has some restrictions to get on the fast paths, so that may improve. as those are removed.
Overall, I find ClickHouse much easier to work with and manage compared to Druid. ymmv
I'll second Simplicity and add in that ClickHouse is also faster on less hardware and more stable compared to our current Druid configuration.
My company currently uses Druid and has for a few years now, but I have been evaluating ClickHouse on the side as a possible replacement, and as a testament to its simplicity, I was able to stand it up and get in going as a PoC pretty quick/easily.
So far I have only found good things about ClickHouse, maybe the only ClickHouse downside has been the management of the cluster and data, but I haven't gotten too far into operationalizing ClickHouse to know how much those kind of items will cost.
Perhaps the other thing is the documentation, while reasonably good imo, still doesn't explain everything as well as I'd like. It was good enough, but I definitely had to experiment on a couple items to get them working as needed.
