ClickHouse, the open source real-time analytics database startup that was spun out of Yandex in 2021, on Tuesday announced that it has acquired PeerDB, a company that focuses on cost-effective Postgres replication and change data capture.
Since its launch, and even before, during its time as a Yandex-backed open-source project, ClickHouse has made a name for itself as a real-time data warehouse for large enterprises. Its customer list includes Deutsche Bank, eBay, Fastly, GitLab, HubSpot, Microsoft, ServiceNow and Spotify. And while ClickHouse already offered a Postgres connector to help businesses move their data from the popular relational database into its analytics database, but PeerDB offers speed improvements of up to 10x as well as a number of specialized capabilities that ClickHouse didn’t previously offer.
“We started off our journey by building a data movement ETL tool with a laser focus on Postgres. We started with this niche of providing the world’s best way to replicate data from Postgres to data warehouses. […] We released our ClickHouse connector around six months ago, and since then, it has only been growing and now it’s the fastest-growing connector, surpassing the other data warehouses like Snowflake and BigQuery,” PeerDB co-founder and CEO Sai Srirampur told me. Before starting PeerDB, Srirampur worked on the Azure’s PostgreSQL service after Microsoft acquired Citus Data, where he previously worked.
Srirampur told me that he always wanted PeerDB to focus on “quality of quantity,” which led the team to focus squarely on building a specialized ETL tool for Postgres. This includes the initial load of what can be terrabytes of data from a Postgres database to a warehouse like ClickHouse, but maybe most importantly, also the change data capture system, which ensures that the original database and the data warehouse stay in sync.
As it turns out, for the majority of PeerDB customers, Postgres was the main source of data for their data warehouse. Maybe that’s no surprise, given that those customers are more likely to choose a service like PeerDB, but clearly ClickHouse saw a growing market for a tool like this, too.
“What we’re seeing very, very often is [customers] using Postgres as the transactional back end for customer-facing applications, and then moving that data into ClickHouse for analytics use cases — this is a very, very common pattern, and there are a number of customers who are using it,” ClickHouse co-founder Yury Izrailevsky told me. “Of course, Postgres is a very complex technology. It’s super powerful but it really requires deep knowledge, especially for Change Data Capture use cases.”
Over time, the PeerDB team will work on enabling change data capture for additional data sources as well. Existing commercial customers will be able to use the PeerDB Cloud service until July 24, 2025.
PeerDB’s existing open-source components will remain open source, without any change to their licenses. ClickHouse will also open source the production-grade Helm charts for PeerDB’s enterprise offering.
The two companies did not disclose the price of the acquisition, but it’s worth noting that PeerDB closed a $3.6 million seed funding round in late 2023, with 8VC leading the round.
“I think that we agreed on a fair price that properly rewards and recognizes the work that the PeerDB team has done and that is fair to the team and to their investors,” Izrailevsky said. “At the same time, I think it still is a great opportunity for us, given the potential.”