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Chkit

Schema, migrations and backfills for ClickHouse (like Drizzle)

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Details

External ID
50063600
Source
HN
Company
—
Product
Chkit
Website domain
github.com
Launched
Oct. 12, 2026
Cohort
—
Upvotes
9
Upvotes percentile
0.52
Tags
—

Description

Hey HN, im Marc, co-founder of ObsessionDB. We are open sourcing ChKit, our tooling to manage schemas, migrations and backfills for clickhouse.I am a big fan of the type safety drizzle provides for the database. Manage the schema in typescript and generate migrations from it is a powerful workflow. I always wished something like it would exist for clickhouse, so we could manage our analytical workloads the same way. It didn't exist, so we build it.We build it after running ClickHouse at petabyte scale in our previous company, were we managed hundreds of tables, MVs and endpoints reading from them.The way it works:1. You define your schema in typescript, with typed helpers for tables, mv, column types etc.. 2. You generate the migration, that contains the DDL, to get your clickhouse instance from status quo to what your current typescript schema defines 3. Your CI can check for drift 4. You run the generated migration against production 5. You use the defined types in your code, to ingest your data while making sure it has the correct type. Bonus: if your schema change was BC breaking, we generate the sequence on how to backfill the data, into the intermediate table to migrate (this is quite the hard problem with large tables and schema evolution)In case you have already a clickhouse instance with a schema, you can pull it down and start using ChKit from where you are.Run our generator to setup the boilerplate: npm create chkit@latest If you folks are running clickhouse in production, I am curious to hear what other challenges you are running into.

Enrichment

Niche
database and data quality tools
Vertical
Horizontal
Function
Data infrastructure
Audience
Developer
AI stance
Not AI
Project type
Hobby / open-source project
Normalized one-liner
schema migrations and backfills for clickhouse
Manually corrected
False

Could you build this?

Partial While basic schema definitions and migration runners can be generated by AI assistants, building a robust Drizzle-like ORM/migration tool specifically for ClickHouse requires handling intricate distributed table engines, mutation asynchronous behaviors, and complex backfill operations.

What it would actually take: Requires TypeScript compiler API / AST analysis to parse and generate schemas, combined with a SQL dialect generator specifically tuned to ClickHouse's DDL (`ENGINE = MergeTree`, Replicated/Distributed engines, `ALTER TABLE ... UPDATE/DELETE` asynchronous mutations). The hard part is managing atomic schema migrations and reliable batch backfills given ClickHouse's non-standard transactional and mutation semantics. Requires solid experience with ClickHouse internals and TypeScript type-level metaprogramming.

Discussion

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Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one — 84 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #41 of 85 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 347 days after the earliest competitor.

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