Andy Pavlo joins ClickHouse to establish ClickHouse Labs

ClickHouse Establishes Research Arm with Andy Pavlo

ClickHouse has launched ClickHouse Labs, a new industry research organization led by Andy Pavlo, a former professor at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). The lab is designed to bridge the gap between academic database research and commercial engineering, focusing on maintaining ClickHouse's position at the "bleeding edge" of database technology.

Unlike traditional isolated research departments, ClickHouse Labs will operate in close collaboration with ClickHouse engineers, customers, and industry partners. The primary objective is to conduct research with scientific value and transform those findings into production-ready technology that directly benefits users.

Strategic Research Focus Areas

ClickHouse Labs will prioritize several key technical domains to evolve the database management system (DBMS) for next-generation workloads:

AI and Agentic Technologies

One of the lab's primary investigations is the intersection of DBMS and emerging AI agents. This research focuses on two distinct vectors:

  1. DBMS for Agents: Determining the architectural requirements for a DBMS to better support AI agents.
  2. Agent-Driven Development: Exploring how AI agents can automate and improve the development of the DBMS itself.

Integration with PostgreSQL

ClickHouse Labs will collaborate with the ClickHouse PostgreSQL team to enhance the performance and reliability of its managed service. By leveraging both PostgreSQL (transactional) and ClickHouse (analytical) foundations, the lab aims to investigate a broader spectrum of database problems across both OLTP and OLAP workloads.

Acceleration of Existing Optimizations

ClickHouse currently maintains a backlog of explored optimizations and ideas that have not yet been fully validated for production. ClickHouse Labs will prioritize accelerating the validation and deployment of these existing internal improvements.

Technical Foundation and Pedigree

Andy Pavlo's decision to join ClickHouse is grounded in the system's early adoption of high-performance internals. Pavlo noted that in 2016, ClickHouse already implemented features typically reserved for closed-source commercial systems, such as being written in C++ and supporting vectorized query execution using SIMD (Single Instruction, Multiple Data). This contrasted with the prominent JVM-based open-source analytical DBMSs of the time, which adopted SIMD optimizations years later.

Community and Industry Perspective

The announcement has sparked significant discussion within the database community, highlighting a broader trend toward industry-led research:

  • Shift from Academia: Some observers noted that public research infrastructure in universities is increasingly unable to support high-impact database research due to funding shifts toward AI.
  • Infrastructure Investment: Community members expressed approval of a corporate research lab focusing on fundamental infrastructure rather than exclusively on AI applications.

"It's refreshing to see corporate research labs in a non AI area. Clickhouse has been a huge beneficiary of the AI wave and its good to see some of the value going into advancing fundamental research in infrastructure"

  • Convergence of OLAP: Technical discussions have emerged regarding the convergence of fast OLAP products like ClickHouse and StarRocks with engines like Trino, specifically concerning decoupled compute/storage architectures and the use of S3 as a storage layer.

Sources