PostHog Handbook Library / Engineering

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# Data ingestion

This document covers:

- Different options for ingesting data into MergeTree tables and trade-offs involved
- How the Kafka table engine works
- What are materialized views?
- Examples of a full schema setup

### Using `INSERT`s for ingestion

As any database system, ClickHouse allows using `INSERT`s to load data.

Each `INSERT` creates a new part in ClickHouse, which comes with a lot of overhead and, in a busy system, will lead to errors due to exceeding `parts_to_throw` MergeTree table setting (default 300).

ClickHouse provides a bunch of options to make `INSERT`s still work. For example:

- Batch inserts
- `async_insert` setting
- Buffer table engine

These come with their own trade-offs, consistency problems, and require the ClickHouse cluster to always be accessible.

### Why we ingest via Kafka tables

We instead rely on the Kafka table engine to handle ingestion into ClickHouse.

The benefits are:

- Resiliency: Kafka handles sudden spikes in traffic and ClickHouse cluster unavailability gracefully
- PostHog already uses Kafka throughout the app, making it a safe technical choice

It also has minimal overhead in terms of memory used and allows us to always temporarily stop ingestion by removing the tables in question.

### How Kafka tables work

Kafka engine tables act as Kafka consumers in a given consumer group. Selecting from that table advances the consumer offsets.

A Kafka table on its own does nothing beyond allowing querying data from Kafka – it needs to be paired with other tables for ingestion to work.

> Important note: Given Kafka engine tables operate like consumers, querying data from them moves the offsets for the consumer group forward. Doing this while ingesting data may cause data loss, and has been disallowed by default on the latest ClickHouse versions.

Example Kafka engine table:

    CREATE TABLE kafka_ingestion_warnings
    (
        team_id Int64,
        source LowCardinality(VARCHAR),
        type VARCHAR,
        details VARCHAR CODEC(ZSTD(3)),
        timestamp DateTime64(6, 'UTC')
    )
    ENGINE = Kafka('kafka:9092', 'clickhouse_ingestion_warnings_test', 'group1', 'JSONEachRow')

It is important to send correctly formatted messages to the topic you're selecting from. When selecting from a Kafka table, ClickHouse assumes messages in the topic are formatted correctly. If not, this may stall the consumer depending on the value of `kafka_skip_broken_messages`, breaking ingestion.

> Beyond just skipping broken messages, it's also possible to set up a dead letter queue system for these in ClickHouse. You can read more about doing so in this Altinity blog post.

### Materialized views

Materialized views in ClickHouse can be thought of as triggers – they react to new blocks being INSERTed into source tables and allow transforming and piping that data to other tables.

Materialized views come with a lot of gotchas. A great resource for learning more about them is this presentation.

### Example schema – reading and writing ingestion events

Consider the following sharded table schema together with `kafka_ingestion_warnings`:

    CREATE TABLE sharded_ingestion_warnings
    (
        team_id Int64,
        source LowCardinality(VARCHAR),
        type VARCHAR,
        details VARCHAR CODEC(ZSTD(3)),
        timestamp DateTime64(6, 'UTC'),
        _timestamp DateTime,
        _offset UInt64,
        _partition UInt64
    )
    ENGINE = ReplicatedMergeTree('/clickhouse/tables/{shard}/posthog.sharded_ingestion_warnings', '{replica}')
    PARTITION BY toYYYYMMDD(timestamp)
    ORDER BY (team_id, toHour(timestamp), type, source, timestamp)

    CREATE TABLE ingestion_warnings ON CLUSTER 'posthog'
    (
        team_id Int64,
        source LowCardinality(VARCHAR),
        type VARCHAR,
        details VARCHAR CODEC(ZSTD(3)),
        timestamp DateTime64(6, 'UTC'),
        _timestamp DateTime,
        _offset UInt64,
        _partition UInt64
    )
    ENGINE = Distributed('posthog', 'posthog', 'sharded_ingestion_warnings', rand())

    CREATE MATERIALIZED VIEW ingestion_warnings_mv
    TO posthog.ingestion_warnings
    AS SELECT
        team_id,
        source,
        type,
        details,
        timestamp,
        _timestamp,
        _offset,
        _partition
    FROM posthog.kafka_ingestion_warnings

In this schema:

- `sharded_ingestion_warnings` MergeTree is responsible for storing the ingested data
- `ingestion_warnings` table is responsible for fielding queries and distributing writes to `sharded_ingestion_warnings` tables across shards
- `ingestion_warnings_mv` regularly polls `kafka_ingestion_warnings` and pushes the data to `ingestion_warnings` distributed table
- Note: it also forwards `_timestamp`, `_offset`, and `_partition` virtual columns containing Kafka message metadata so they can be stored and used during debugging.

#### Example schema visualized

This is the same schema visualized in a ClickHouse cluster with 2 shards and 1 replica each:

    flowchart TB
        classDef table fill:#FAEEDA,stroke:#854F0B,color:#412402;
        classDef kafka fill:#EEEDFE,stroke:#534AB7,color:#26215C;

        Kafka["<b>Kafka</b><br/>clickhouse_events_proto topic"]:::kafka

        subgraph CH ["ClickHouse cluster"]
            subgraph CH1 ["Shard 1, replica 1"]
                kafka_ingestion_warnings1["<b>kafka_ingestion_warnings</b><br/>Kafka table engine"]:::table
                ingestion_warnings_mv1["<b>ingestion_warnings_mv</b><br/>Materialized view"]:::table
                ingestion_warnings1["<b>ingestion_warnings</b><br/>Distributed table engine"]:::table
                sharded_ingestion_warnings1["<b>sharded_ingestion_warnings</b><br/>ReplicatedMergeTree engine"]:::table
            end
            subgraph CH2 ["Shard 2, replica 1"]
                kafka_ingestion_warnings2["<b>kafka_ingestion_warnings</b><br/>Kafka table engine"]:::table
                ingestion_warnings_mv2["<b>ingestion_warnings_mv</b><br/>Materialized view"]:::table
                ingestion_warnings2["<b>ingestion_warnings</b><br/>Distributed table engine"]:::table
                sharded_ingestion_warnings2["<b>sharded_ingestion_warnings</b><br/>ReplicatedMergeTree engine"]:::table
            end
        end

        style CH fill:#F1EFE8,stroke:#B4B2A9,color:#2C2C2A
        style CH1 fill:#FCFBF8,stroke:#D3D1C7,color:#5F5E5A
        style CH2 fill:#FCFBF8,stroke:#D3D1C7,color:#5F5E5A

        Kafka -..- kafka_ingestion_warnings1
        Kafka -..- kafka_ingestion_warnings2

        kafka_ingestion_warnings1 --> ingestion_warnings_mv1
        kafka_ingestion_warnings2 --> ingestion_warnings_mv2
        ingestion_warnings_mv1 --> ingestion_warnings1
        ingestion_warnings_mv2 --> ingestion_warnings2

        ingestion_warnings1 -.-> sharded_ingestion_warnings1
        ingestion_warnings1 -.-> sharded_ingestion_warnings2
        ingestion_warnings2 -.-> sharded_ingestion_warnings1
        ingestion_warnings2 -.-> sharded_ingestion_warnings2

        linkStyle 6,7,8,9 stroke:#BA7517

### Further reading

- Performance Considerations ClickHouse docs
- Using the Kafka table engine
- Kafka ClickHouse docs
- Confluent concepts (Zookeeper)
- ClickHouse Materialized Views Illuminated, Part 1
- ClickHouse's not so secret weapon... Materialized Views
- [Everything you should know

about materialized views.](https://den-crane.github.io/Everything_you_should_know_about_materialized_views_commented.pdf)

Next in the ClickHouse manual: Working with JSON

Canonical URL: https://posthog.com/handbook/engineering/clickhouse/data-ingestion

GitHub source: contents/handbook/engineering/clickhouse/data-ingestion.mdx

Content hash: `e026d2e9451e0f2b`