clickhouse-go

ClickHouse is the database teams reach for when Postgres analytics queries start taking minutes. This is the official Go client, maintained by the ClickHouse team under Apache 2.0. It offers two ways in: a native interface that encodes columns directly, and a standard database/sql driver that drops into ORMs you already use. The native path is faster.

Nothing to operate, it is a library. What matters is the thing it talks to, and self-hosted ClickHouse is Apache 2.0 and free. The driver handles connection pooling, failover across addresses, and LZ4 or ZSTD compression with no extra config. Bulk and async inserts are first-class, because ClickHouse punishes row-at-a-time writes.

Use it if you write Go and touch ClickHouse. There is nothing to weigh it against: ch-go is the lower-level library this one builds on, not a competitor. Every team size gets the same thing for free. Cost appears only if you choose ClickHouse Cloud over running it yourself.

The catch is version churn. Recent releases test against only the two newest Go versions, so an old toolchain pins you to an old driver. Raw streaming for CSV, JSON and Parquet is still experimental and works over HTTP transport only.