Postgres or ClickHouse? Row vs Column Storage, and When Each Wins

Short summary

PostgreSQL stores data row-by-row, excelling at transactional workloads with fast single-record access. ClickHouse stores column-by-column, dominating analytics and aggregations over massive datasets with superior compression. The choice hinges on your dominant query pattern: frequent single-record access means Postgres; massive dataset scans mean ClickHouse. Best practice: run both in parallel.

• •Row storage (PostgreSQL): fast point lookups and updates, slow at aggregating millions of rows
• •Column storage (ClickHouse): extremely fast analytics and scans, slow and painful for single-row updates
• •Don't choose—use Postgres for transactional app core and ClickHouse for analytics, logs, and metrics

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