ClickHouse at Scale: Handling Reads and Writes

This post, the second in a series, dives deep into optimizing read performance in ClickHouse under heavy load. The author debunks the myth of completely decoupling reads and writes, highlighting how frequent data ingestion impacts read efficiency. It explores strategies for handling various traffic types (real-time, long-running queries, backfills), query design best practices (sorting key design, filter optimization, `max_threads` configuration), and cluster monitoring and error handling. The article also covers materialized view management, troubleshooting common issues, and shares practical experiences from Tinybird.