TL;DR
· On identical hardware and data, ClickHouse matches PostgreSQL for single-row UPDATEs and is up to 4,000× faster in our tests for bulk UPDATEs.
· Why it matters: Bulk updates are common in OLTP workloads, and ClickHouse’s columnar design + parallelism make them far faster.
· Caveat: PostgreSQL is fully transactional by default; ClickHouse isn’t. Results compare each engine’s native execution model, not identical transaction guarantees.
PostgreSQL is the most popular open-source OLTP database in the world.
It’s a fair assumption that, when a developer thinks about UPDATE performance, they probably think of the baseline that PostgreSQL sets.
In contrast, ClickHouse is the most popular open-source OLAP database in the world.
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