Building Financial Data Platforms: When to Choose ClickHouse vs kdb+ vs TimescaleDB
If you are building a financial data platform, the database choice determines what your quants and risk analysts can do — and how fast they can do it. Pick kdb+ and your time-series queries execute in microseconds, but your infrastructure bill runs six figures. Pick ClickHouse and you get analytical power at a fraction of the cost, but you trade off the specialised financial operations language that your quant team has been using for a decade. Pick TimescaleDB and your PostgreSQL-skilled engineers are productive immediately, but you hit query performance walls at petabyte scale. We have deployed all three in production at tier-one banks and hedge funds — kdb+ for real-time market data analytics, ClickHouse for regulatory reporting and risk aggregation, and TimescaleDB for back-office and treasury workloads. Here is what we learned about where each one fits. ...