GoKawiilpgrust v0.4-beta's Gravity engine claims up to 3x ClickHouse speed on ClickBench
The pgrust team released v0.4-beta featuring Gravity, a new query engine built with a custom compiler that generates machine code for SQL queries. According to the developers, Gravity runs up to three times faster than ClickHouse on the ClickBench benchmark while still supporting the full Postgres SQL dialect and type system. The engine builds on earlier work using batching, operator fusion, SIMD, and a copy-and-patch JIT compiler.
GoKawiil's interpretation of the reporting above, not reported fact.
The claim, if it holds up under independent testing, would be notable because ClickBench was designed by ClickHouse itself to showcase its own performance, so beating it while retaining Postgres compatibility could appeal to teams wanting both speed and SQL familiarity. The developers describe an approach of designing toward hardware's theoretical speed limit rather than incremental optimization, which they suggest let them avoid leaving performance 'on the table' compared to prior copy-and-patch methods.
- pgrust v0.4-beta introduces a new query engine called Gravity
- Gravity reportedly outperforms ClickHouse by up to 3x on ClickBench while keeping full Postgres SQL compatibility
- The team says they designed the engine by starting from hardware's theoretical speed limit rather than iterative bottleneck fixing
Source: pgrust.com, 2026-10-30
Published there as: “Programming at Light Speed: Building the Gravity Query Engine”
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