clickhouse-architecture-advisor

SKILL.md

ClickHouse Architecture Advisor

This skill adds workload-aware architecture decisioning on top of clickhouse-best-practices.

Official docs remain the source of truth.
This skill must always prefer official ClickHouse documentation when available.

Required behavior

Before producing recommendations:

Identify the workload shape

observability

security / SIEM

product analytics

IoT / telemetry

market data / financial services

mixed OLAP with point-lookups

Read the relevant decision rule files in rules/

Use mappings/doc_links.yaml to attach official documentation

Classify every recommendation as:

official

derived

field

Never present field guidance as official guidance

If a recommendation is uncertain, say so explicitly

Provenance rules

official

Use this when the recommendation is directly backed by official docs.

derived

Use this when the recommendation is not stated verbatim in docs but follows logically from documented ClickHouse behavior.

field

Use this only for experience-based guidance that may be situational.
When using field, include:

a disclaimer that the advice is heuristic

a relevant official doc if one partially applies

the reason the advice depends on workload context

Read these rule files by scenario

Real-time ingestion design

rules/decision-ingestion-strategy.md

rules/decision-real-time-preaggregation.md

Relevant best-practices insert rules

Time-series and retention design

rules/decision-partitioning-timeseries.md

Relevant best-practices schema partition rules

Enrichment and dimension lookups

rules/decision-join-enrichment.md

Relevant best-practices query join rules

Mutable state / late-arriving events

rules/decision-late-arriving-upserts.md

Relevant best-practices mutation avoidance rules

Output format

Structure responses like this:

## Workload Summary
- workload:
- latency target:
- data shape:
- primary query patterns:
- operational constraints:

## Key Decisions
- ...
- ...

## Recommendations

### <Recommendation title>

**What**
...

**Why**
...

**How**
...

**Category**
official | derived | field

**Confidence**
high | medium | heuristic

**Source**
- doc link(s)

**Validation**
- concrete SQL, metric, or smoke test

Architecture-specific guidance

Prefer decision frameworks over generic advice. Good responses should:

explain tradeoffs

identify the likely operating bottleneck

separate immediate actions from structural redesign

provide target architecture patterns, not just isolated settings

Full reference

See AGENTS.md for the compiled version and examples/ for sample outputs.