Sink data from RisingWave to ClickHouse

This guide describes how to sink data from RisingWave to ClickHouse using the ClickHouse sink connector in RisingWave.

Need help generating SQL? Use Claude Code or Cursor with the RisingWave MCP server to generate and run SQL interactively.

ClickHouse is a high-performance, column-oriented SQL database management system (DBMS) for online analytical processing (OLAP). For more information about ClickHouse, see ClickHouse official website.

Prerequisites

• Ensure you already have a ClickHouse table that you can sink data to. For additional guidance on creating a table and setting up ClickHouse, refer to this quick start guide.
• Ensure you have an upstream materialized view or source that you can sink data from.

We highly recommend using the deduplication engine, like ReplacingMergeTree, in ClickHouse. This is because it addresses the potential problem of duplicate writes in ClickHouse during RisingWave recovery when primary keys can be duplicated.

Syntax

CREATE SINK [ IF NOT EXISTS ] sink_name
[FROM sink_from | AS select_query]
WITH (
   connector='clickhouse',
   connector_parameter = 'value', ...
);

Parameters

Parameter Names	Description
type	Required. Specify if the sink should be upsert or append-only. If creating an upsert sink, see the Overview on when to define the primary key and Upsert sinks on limitations.
primary_key	Optional. A string of a list of column names, separated by commas, that specifies the primary key of the ClickHouse sink.
clickhouse.url	Required. Address of the ClickHouse server that you want to sink data to. Format: http://ip:port. The default port is 8123.
clickhouse.user	Required. User name for accessing the ClickHouse server.
clickhouse.password	Required. Password for accessing the ClickHouse server.
clickhouse.database	Required. Name of the ClickHouse database that you want to sink data to.
clickhouse.table	Required. Name of the ClickHouse table that you want to sink data to.
commit_checkpoint_interval	Optional. Commit every N checkpoints (N > 0). Default value is 10. The behavior of this field also depends on the sink_decouple setting: If sink_decouple is true (the default), the default value of commit_checkpoint_interval is 10. If sink_decouple is set to false, the default value of commit_checkpoint_interval is 1. If sink_decouple is set to false and commit_checkpoint_interval is set to larger than 1, an error will occur.
clickhouse.delete.column	Optional. You can run an upsert sink using the ReplacingMergeTree engine. When using the ReplacingMergeTree engine, you can specify the delete column with this parameter.

Upsert sinks

While RisingWave supports append-only sinks for all ClickHouse engines, support for upsert sinks is limited. Additionally, for ReplacingMergeTree engines, an append-only sink will not insert duplicate data.

RisingWave supports upsert sinks for the following ClickHouse engines:

• CollapsingMergeTree: DELETE operations are transformed into INSERT with SIGN = -1.
• VersionedCollapsingMergeTree: DELETE operations are transformed into INSERT with SIGN = -1.
• ReplacingMergeTree: DELETE operations are transformed into INSERT with SIGN = 1.

Supported table engines

RisingWave supports the following table engines of ClickHouse:

• MergeTree
• ReplacingMergeTree
• SummingMergeTree
• AggregatingMergeTree
• CollapsingMergeTree
• VersionedCollapsingMergeTree
• GraphiteMergeTree
• ReplicatedMergeTree
• ReplicatedReplacingMergeTree
• ReplicatedSummingMergeTree
• ReplicatedAggregatingMergeTree
• ReplicatedCollapsingMergeTree
• ReplicatedVersionedCollapsingMergeTree
• ReplicatedGraphiteMergeTree
• SharedMergeTree
• SharedReplacingMergeTree
• SharedSummingMergeTree
• SharedAggregatingMergeTree
• SharedCollapsingMergeTree
• SharedVersionedCollapsingMergeTree
• SharedGraphiteMergeTree

Among these, engines prefixed with “Shared” are exclusively available in ClickHouse Cloud and are premium features in RisingWave. They provide enhanced capabilities for distributed deployments, automatic replication, and improved resource management. For more information about it, see MergeTree Engine Family .

PREMIUM FEATURE

This is a premium feature. For a comprehensive overview of all premium features and their usage, please see RisingWave premium features.

Load data with COPY TO STDOUT

ClickHouse will automatically use the PostgreSQL-compatible COPY command to load data from RisingWave. For more details on the COPY command, see COPY.

Examples

This section includes several examples that you can use if you want to quickly experiment with sinking data to ClickHouse.

Create a ClickHouse table (if you do not already have one)

For example, let’s consider creating a basic ClickHouse table with the primary key as seq_id and the ENGINE set to ReplacingMergeTree. It’s important to emphasize that without using ReplacingMergeTree or other deduplication techniques, there is a significant risk of duplicate writes to ClickHouse.

Note that only S3-compatible object store is supported, such as AWS S3 or MinIO.

CREATE TABLE demo_test(
    seq_id Int32,
    user_id Int32,
    user_name String
) ENGINE = ReplacingMergeTree
PRIMARY KEY (seq_id);

Create an upstream materialized view or source

The following query creates an append-only source. For more details on creating a source, see CREATE SOURCE.

CREATE SOURCE s1_source (
    seq_id integer,
    user_id integer,
    user_name varchar)
WITH (
    connector ='datagen',
    fields.seq_id.kind ='sequence',
    fields.seq_id.start ='1',
    fields.seq_id.end ='10000000',
    fields.user_id.kind ='random',
    fields.user_id.min ='1',
    fields.user_id.max ='10000000',
    fields.user_name.kind ='random',
    fields.user_name.length ='10',
    datagen.rows.per.second ='20000'
 ) FORMAT PLAIN ENCODE JSON;

Another option is to create an upsert table, which supports in-place updates. For more details on creating a table, see CREATE TABLE .

CREATE TABLE s1_table (
    seq_id integer,
    user_id integer,
    user_name varchar)
WITH (
    connector ='datagen',
    fields.seq_id.kind ='sequence',
    fields.seq_id.start ='1',
    fields.seq_id.end ='10000000',
    fields.user_id.kind ='random',
    fields.user_id.min ='1',
    fields.user_id.max ='10000000',
    fields.user_name.kind ='random',
    fields.user_name.length ='10',
    datagen.rows.per.second ='20000'
 ) FORMAT PLAIN ENCODE JSON;

Append-only sink from append-only source

If you have an append-only source and want to create an append-only sink, set type = append-only in the CREATE SINK SQL query.

CREATE SINK s1_sink FROM t1_table
WITH (
    connector = 'clickhouse',
    type = 'append-only',
    clickhouse.url = '${CLICKHOUSE_URL}',
    clickhouse.user = '${CLICKHOUSE_USER}',
    clickhouse.password = '${CLICKHOUSE_PASSWORD}',
    clickhouse.database = 'default',
    clickhouse.table='demo_test'
);

Append-only sink from upsert source

If you have an upsert source and want to create an append-only sink, set type = append-only and force_append_only = true. This will ignore delete messages in the upstream, and turn upstream update messages into insert messages.

CREATE SINKs1_sink FROM t1_table
WITH (
    connector = 'clickhouse',
    type = 'append-only',
    clickhouse.url = '${CLICKHOUSE_URL}',
    clickhouse.user = '${CLICKHOUSE_USER}',
    clickhouse.password = '${CLICKHOUSE_PASSWORD}',
    clickhouse.database = 'default',
    clickhouse.table='demo_test'
);

Upsert sink from upsert source

If you have an upsert source and want to create an upsert sink, set type = upsert. When the sink type is upsert, be sure to set the primary_key field to specify the primary key of the downstream ClickHouse table.

CREATE SINK s1_sink FROM s1_table
WITH (
    connector = 'clickhouse',
    type = 'upsert',
    primary_key = 'seq_id',
    clickhouse.url = '${CLICKHOUSE_URL}',
    clickhouse.user = '${CLICKHOUSE_USER}',
    clickhouse.password = '${CLICKHOUSE_PASSWORD}',
    clickhouse.database = 'default',
    clickhouse.table='demo_test'
);

Data type mapping

RisingWave Data Type	ClickHouse Data Type
boolean	Bool
smallint	Int16 or UInt16
integer	Int32 or UInt32
bigint	Int64 or UInt64
real	Float32
double precision	Float64
decimal	Decimal
character varying	String
bytea	Not supported
date	Date32
time without time zone	Not supported
timestamp	Not supported. Please convert timestamp to timestamptz within RisingWave before sinking.
timestamptz	DateTime64
interval	Not supported
struct	Nested
array	Array
JSONB	Not supported

In ClickHouse, the Nested data type doesn’t support multiple levels of nesting. Therefore, when sinking RisingWave’s struct data to ClickHouse, you need to flatten or restructure the nested data to align with ClickHouse’s requirement.

Before v1.9, when inserting data into a ClickHouse sink, an error would be reported if the values were “nan (not a number)”, “inf (infinity)”, or “-inf (-infinity)”. Since v1.9, we have made a change to this behavior. If the ClickHouse column is nullable, we will insert null values in such cases. If the column is not nullable, we will insert 0 instead.

Please be aware that the range of specific values varies among ClickHouse types and RisingWave types. Refer to the table below for detailed information.

ClickHouse type	RisingWave type	ClickHouse range	RisingWave range
Date32	DATE	1900-01-01 to 2299-12-31	0001-01-01 to 9999-12-31
DateTime64	TIMESTAMPTZ	1900-01-01 00:00:00 to 2299-12-31 23:59:59.99999999	0001-01-01 00:00:00 to 9999-12-31 23:59:59