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Schema Design Principles

TL;DR

Schema design impacts storage and query performance. Five principles: use smaller data types, get sorting keys right, leverage specialized types, compress your data, and plan for schema evolution.

The Five Principles

Get these right and your queries go from seconds to milliseconds:

  1. Data Types: Smaller is faster
  2. Sorting Keys: Get this wrong and everything slows down
  3. Specialized Types: Use LowCardinality and friends
  4. Compression: Less data on disk = faster queries
  5. Schema Evolution: Plan ahead (or use tools that abstract it)
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Schema Design Principles | ClickHouse for Developers