ClickHouse9 min readintermediate
How Fountain rebuilt its data plane on ClickHouse Cloud to power Cue, the Frontline Superintelligence
Summary
Fountain replaced a multi‑vendor batch pipeline (Postgres + MongoDB → replication → S3/Iceberg → BigQuery/ClickHouse) with a single‑hop real‑time data plane built on ClickPipes and ClickHouse Cloud. CDC streams 13 Postgres and 4 MongoDB sources directly into ClickHouse, where native JSON, incremental materialized views, and role‑based access control provide sub‑second query latency, 66 % cost red…
- Batch refreshes of 3 h were too slow for minute‑scale hiring decisions; moving to CDC cut latency to <2 min, most queries <1 s.
- ClickPipes managed CDC eliminated three vendors, three storage hops, and four separate bills.
- Native JSON type removed costly JSONExtract calls for MongoDB, enabling columnar storage of nested docs.
- Incremental materialized views (using ReplacingMergeTree) performed transformations at insert time, reducing query memory by up to 80 % and eliminating orchestration tools.
Real‑time analytics on high‑cardinality hiring data is essential for frontline workforce platforms where decisions must be made in minutes. Fountain’s architecture shows how a single ClickHouse‑based pipeline can replace a complex, costly batch stack while delivering sub‑second latency, significant…
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