ClickHouse today announced the launch of ClickHouse Labs, a new research group led by Andy Pavlo, one of the database industry’s most prominent researchers. Dr. Pavlo joins ClickHouse as Vice President of Database Research and will build a team dedicated to advancing the state of the art in database systems.
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Andy Pavlo, VP of Database Research, ClickHouse
Pavlo is an award-winning database researcher and professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s Computer Science Department. He is known throughout the database community for his work on autonomous databases, transaction processing, and large-scale data analytics. At ClickHouse, he will bring that expertise to some of the most ambitious and consequential challenges facing modern data systems, as AI reshapes the demands placed on all data-intensive workloads.
“At ClickHouse, we are interested in finding new and innovative ways of processing data, exploring efficient data structures and algorithms, and pushing computer hardware to its limits,” said Alexey Milovidov, CTO of ClickHouse. “I’m thrilled that Andy Pavlo is joining ClickHouse as VP of Database Research and will lead our new research group, ClickHouse Labs.”
Advancing database technology in the open
ClickHouse Labs will pursue foundational research across database and data architectures, query processing, systems performance, and infrastructure, for both ClickHouse and PostgreSQL databases. Advances in these underlying technologies will power the next generation of real-time analytics, data warehousing, observability, and AI applications.
“The most exciting database research does more than describe a new idea in a paper. It demonstrates what is possible by building and testing real systems,” said Pavlo. “ClickHouse has an exceptional engineering culture, a strong open-source community, and workloads that push database technology to its limits. ClickHouse Labs gives us an opportunity to take on difficult problems, evaluate them in real-world scenarios, and share what we discover with the broader community and ecosystem.”
Research that changes what is possible
Before co-founding the company, Yury Izrailevsky, ClickHouse President of Product and Technology, served as VP of Engineering at Google, which has a long history of turning foundational research into industry-defining technology. Some of the clearest examples come from research that began with Google’s own most demanding technical challenges.
Google’s Spanner paper introduced a new model for globally distributed databases, demonstrating that systems could operate at global scale while still supporting strongly consistent transactions. Years later, Attention Is All You Need introduced the Transformer architecture, laying the foundation for modern large language models and today’s paradigm-shifting era of AI. In both cases, research conducted within a company did more than solve an internal problem: it changed what was technically possible and gave the broader industry an entirely new foundation to build on.
ClickHouse Labs is founded on the same belief. By combining ambitious research with hands-on systems development, the team aims to advance ClickHouse and PostgreSQL while contributing new ideas and technologies to the broader database ecosystem.
Researchers will build and test their ideas against demanding real-world workloads, work closely with ClickHouse engineers, and publish their findings in leading research venues so others can evaluate, extend, and build upon them.
“Because ClickHouse is open source, ideas developed here can be tested, challenged, and extended by teams around the world,” said Yury Izrailevsky, President of Product and Technology at ClickHouse. “With Andy leading ClickHouse Labs, we have an opportunity to pursue foundational research with the potential to shape both the future of ClickHouse and the broader database industry.”
About Andy Pavlo
Andy Pavlo is an Associate Professor with Indefinite Tenure in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University. Since 2013, he has led the Carnegie Mellon Database Research Group. His work has received several of the database community’s highest honors, including the IEEE TCDE Ramez Elmasri Database Education Award, VLDB Early Career Award, NSF CAREER Award, Sloan Research Fellowship, and ACM SIGMOD Jim Gray Best Dissertation Award in Databases. Pavlo previously co-founded and served as CEO of OtterTune, which applied machine learning to database optimization.
At ClickHouse, Pavlo will serve as VP of Database Research and lead the development of ClickHouse Labs, its research agenda, and its team.
About ClickHouse
ClickHouse is a fast, open-source columnar database built for real-time data processing and analytics at scale. ClickHouse Cloud delivers the query speed and concurrency that applications demanding instant insight from large volumes of data require. As AI agents become more embedded in software, generating higher query volumes at tighter latency, ClickHouse provides a high-throughput, low-latency engine purpose-built for that workload. Customers include Sony, Tesla, Anthropic, Memorial Sloan Kettering, Lyft, and Instacart. More at clickhouse.com.
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