Why HockeyStack is Built on ClickHouse: Real-Time Analytics at Enterprise Scale

Modern GTM teams can’t afford to wait hours for data to update. Real-time feedback loops are the difference between reacting and leading. At HockeyStack, we’ve engineered our analytics infrastructure to handle billions of events instantly, powering live dashboards, attribution models, and AI-driven insights without delay. In this article, we’ll cover why we chose ClickHouse over alternatives like BigQuery.

Building for Real-Time Marketing Analytics

HockeyStack’s mission is to enable real-time, large-scale GTM analytics, turning sales and GTM data into insights, plans, and actions. Achieving that vision requires infrastructure built for speed and scale.

At the core of every data platform is a data warehouse — the engine that stores and processes all company data. Traditional data warehouses like BigQuery are a popular choice amongst legacy GTM platforms. However, BigQuery is built for batch analysis—excellent for reports, but inadequate for live feedback loops. Real-time analytics demands speed, infrastructure, and flexibility that responds in milliseconds, not minutes.

ClickHouse meets that standard. It is engineered for speed, cost-efficiency, and runtime computation at scale. Engineered for extreme performance, it underpins the data infrastructure of HockeyStack and many enterprises. OpenAI, Anthropic, Twilio, Uber, IBM, Cloudflare, Cisco, and more are all running on Clickhouse instead of other platforms like BigQuery — proof that it can handle the world’s most demanding analytical workloads.

Analytical Demands at Enterprise Scale

HockeyStack’s enterprise customers generate billions of marketing and sales touchpoints daily. Our infrastructure continuously ingests, correlates, and updates gigabytes of data every second from website tracking and dozens of integrations. These real-time streams power lead scoring models, campaign performance dashboards, AI interfaces, and revenue attribution engines that must respond instantly. Even a few minutes of delay can disrupt automation, routing, and decision-making.

The HockeyStack database contains trillions of rows —  ingesting over 5 million new rows every second, and processing more than 400 billion rows of data daily. With a sustained average write throughput of 1 GB per second, and peaks exceeding 100 GB per second, we execute analytical queries on tables with billions of rows with sub-second latency.

This level of performance ensures that even the largest enterprises can rely on HockeyStack for real-time analytics across massive datasets without latency, lag, or compromise in accuracy.

Legacy architectures simply cannot support this volume or velocity. Their design forces periodic re-computation, creating data latency that breaks real-time operations. HockeyStack was built to eliminate those trade-offs.

Why BigQuery Wasn’t the Right Fit

Many analytics vendors are built on BigQuery. Its appeal is clear: managed infrastructure, straightforward setup, and tight integration with Google Cloud. But simplicity at small scale becomes a liability at enterprise scale.

Real-Time Capabilities

BigQuery’s query latency disrupts real-time marketing operations. BigQuery runs in batch mode, refreshing datasets a few times a day.

Performance Focus

On equivalent hardware, ClickHouse consistently outperforms BigQuery. It achieves superior compression ratios, better storage utilization, and faster query speeds—key factors in sustaining real-time responsiveness.

Enterprise-Grade Scalability and Cost Advantage

In BigQuery, as event volume grows, so does cost—often unpredictably. In the GTM analytics space, this cost is most often passed on to the customer, leading to unplanned and unexpected pricing increases.

Row-Based Architecture Limitations

BigQuery’s row-oriented storage format is optimized for transactional workloads and batch processing—not continuous, high-frequency updates. This design actually makes it too slow to do realtime updates to data at massive scale without commensurate massive cost.

Why HockeyStack Chose ClickHouse

Real-Time Capabilities

ClickHouse continuously processes updates through its push-based streaming architecture, ensuring that conversions, engagement events, and other data changes are reflected instantly. Its high-throughput query engine delivers consistent speed, even as data volume scales, without performance degradation.

HockeyStack builds on this foundation by seamlessly combining streaming and batch processing. This hybrid approach allows us to capture live user activity in real time while efficiently handling large-scale historical computations. The result is an analytics layer that offers both real-time responsiveness and massive-scale efficiency—the best of both worlds.

This means when a user defines a new metric or goal in HockeyStack, it’s reflected instantly across every report and view—no lengthy recomputation, and no waiting.Because HockeyStack calculates definitions at runtime, marketers can test, measure, and adjust their metrics in real time rather than analyzing outcomes days later.

Enterprise-Grade Scalability and Cost Advantage

ClickHouse scales linearly across compute and storage, enabling predictable economics and faster insights. Its open architecture eliminates vendor lock-in and allows fine-tuning for specific workloads, leading to both cost efficiency and enterprise-grade performance.

Open Source Advantage

ClickHouse has proven itself at massive scale, powering data infrastructure for some of the world’s most demanding companies. Its open-source community advances the technology rapidly, with frequent monthly releases and a wealth of shared expertise.

HockeyStack runs on servers optimized specifically for ClickHouse workloads, leveraging this open ecosystem to deliver continuously improving performance and stability.

Engineering-Focused Design

ClickHouse offers granular control over storage, replication, and performance tuning. Therefore, HockeyStack’s engineers can fine-tune accuracy, deduplication, and throughput for each use case.

Dedicated database specialists within HockeyStack focus exclusively on performance optimization, ensuring that every query, dashboard, and data stream operates with maximum efficiency.

Summary

HockeyStack enables real-time GTM analytics at enterprise scale, turning billions of daily sales and marketing events into instant insights. Traditional data warehouses like BigQuery weren’t built for this pace; they rely on batch processing, creating latency that breaks live feedback loops.

By adopting ClickHouse, HockeyStack delivers sub-second responsiveness, predictable scalability, and massive throughput — over 5 million rows per second and 432 billion per day —making it the foundation for real-time decision-making at any scale.

With ClickHouse’s engineering excellence with HockeyStack’s purpose-built GTM intelligence platform, we’re redefining what’s possible for data-driven marketing and sales teams. Real-time insights, at enterprise scale.

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