clickhouse-cost-tuning

name	clickhouse-cost-tuning
description	Optimize ClickHouse Cloud costs — compute scaling, storage tiering, compression, and query efficiency for lower bills. Use when analyzing ClickHouse Cloud bills, reducing storage costs, or optimizing compute utilization. Trigger: "clickhouse cost", "clickhouse billing", "reduce clickhouse spend", "clickhouse pricing", "clickhouse expensive", "clickhouse storage cost".
allowed-tools	Read, Grep
version	1.0.0
license	MIT
author	Jeremy Longshore <[e-mail]>
tags	["saas","database","analytics","clickhouse","olap"]
compatible-with	claude-code

ClickHouse Cost Tuning

Overview

Reduce ClickHouse Cloud costs through storage optimization, compression tuning, TTL policies, compute scaling, and query efficiency improvements.

Prerequisites

• ClickHouse Cloud account with billing access
• Understanding of current data volumes and query patterns

Instructions

Step 1: Understand ClickHouse Cloud Pricing

Component	Pricing Model	Key Driver
Compute	Per-hour per replica	vCPU + memory tier
Storage	Per GB-month	Compressed data on disk
Network	Per GB egress	Query result sizes
Backups	Per GB stored	Backup retention

Key insight: ClickHouse bills on compressed storage, and ClickHouse compresses extremely well (often 10-20x). Your cost driver is usually compute, not storage.

Step 2: Analyze Storage Usage

-- Storage cost breakdown by table
SELECT
    database,
    table,
    formatReadableSize(sum(bytes_on_disk)) AS compressed_size,
    formatReadableSize(sum(data_uncompressed_bytes)) AS raw_size,
    round(sum(data_uncompressed_bytes) / sum(bytes_on_disk), 1) AS compression_ratio,
    sum(rows) AS total_rows,
    count() AS parts
FROM system.parts
WHERE active
GROUP BY database, table
ORDER BY sum(bytes_on_disk) DESC;



    ,
    ,
    type,
    formatReadableSize((column_data_compressed_bytes))  compressed,
    formatReadableSize((column_data_uncompressed_bytes))  raw,
    round((column_data_uncompressed_bytes)  (column_data_compressed_bytes), )  ratio
 system.parts_columns
 active  database  
  , , type
  (column_data_compressed_bytes) 
LIMIT ;