ClickHouse, the open-source real-time analytics database startup that spun out of Yandex in 2021, announced on Tuesday that it has acquired PeerDB, a company focused on cost-efficient Postgres replication and change data capture.
Since its release, and even before that, when it was an open source project backed by Yandex, ClickHouse has made a name for itself as a real-time data warehouse for large enterprises. Its customers include Deutsche Bank, eBay, Fastly, GitLab, HubSpot, Microsoft, ServiceNow, and Spotify. ClickHouse already offered a Postgres connector to help enterprises migrate data from popular relational databases to their own analytical databases, but PeerDB offers up to 10x speed improvements and a host of specialized features that ClickHouse did not previously offer.
“We started by building a data movement ETL tool focused on Postgres. We started with a niche in providing the best way in the world to replicate data from Postgres into a data warehouse. […] “We launched the ClickHouse connector about six months ago and it's grown ever since, and is now our fastest-growing connector, surpassing other data warehouses like Snowflake and BigQuery,” said Sai Srirampur, co-founder and CEO of PeerDB. Prior to starting PeerDB, Srirampur worked on Azure's PostgreSQL service after his previous company, Citus Data, was acquired by Microsoft.
Srirampur told me that he always wanted PeerDB to focus on “quality over quantity,” so the team dove headfirst into building a Postgres-specific ETL tool, which included the initial loading of terabytes of data from Postgres databases into warehouses like ClickHouse, but perhaps most importantly, a change data capture system to ensure that the original database and the data warehouse remained in sync.
After all, for the vast majority of PeerDB customers, Postgres was the primary data source for their data warehouse. This may not be surprising given that these customers are more likely to choose a service like PeerDB, but it's clear that ClickHouse recognized the growing market for such tools.
“What we see very often is [customers] “Using Postgres as a transactional backend for customer-facing applications and then moving that data into ClickHouse for analytical use cases is a very common pattern, and we have a lot of customers using this,” says Yury Izrailevsky, co-founder of ClickHouse. “Of course, Postgres is a very complex technology. It's very powerful, but it really requires deep knowledge, especially for change data capture use cases.”
The PeerDB team will also work to enable change data capture for additional data sources in the future. Existing commercial customers can use the PeerDB Cloud service until July 24, 2025.
PeerDB's existing open source components will remain open source with no changes to their licenses, and ClickHouse will also open source its production-grade Helm charts for PeerDB's enterprise offerings.
The companies did not disclose the acquisition price, but it is worth noting that PeerDB completed a $3.6 million seed round of funding in late 2023, with 8VC leading the round.
“We believe we have agreed to a fair price that properly compensates and recognizes the work the PeerDB team has done, which is fair to the team and to our investors,” Izrailevsky said. “At the same time, we still see it as a great opportunity for us, given the potential.”