Exploring an ORM for OLAP Databases: The Moose OLAP Approach

Modern applications increasingly rely on user-facing analytics and AI powered by aggregations across large datasets, pushing developers towards analytical databases like ClickHouse. This article explores the possibilities and challenges of building an ORM for OLAP databases. Extending existing OLTP ORMs to OLAP is problematic due to semantic differences. Moose OLAP, an open-source project, attempts to provide an ORM-like interface for ClickHouse. It borrows from the strengths of OLTP ORMs but adapts to OLAP specifics, such as handling NULL values and uniqueness constraints differently. Moose OLAP emphasizes schema-as-code, provides OLAP-native semantics and defaults, and supports versioned migrations to handle the dynamic schema changes inherent in OLAP environments.