SelectDB Beats ClickHouse to Top ClickBench Analytical Database Rankings

ClickBench, an analytical database performance ranking that uses real‑production workloads, recently saw a newcomer surge to the top: SelectDB, a cloud‑native data warehouse less than a year old.

The benchmark evaluates databases on three metrics using the same dataset on a specific instance type (c6a.4xlarge, 500 GB gp2): data import time, storage size (compression ratio), and SQL execution latency. Each metric is compared against the best‑performing baseline, and the ratio to the baseline indicates how far a product is from the industry optimum.

For query performance, ClickBench runs each SQL three times, records the shortest execution (Hot Run) and also measures a cold execution after clearing memory (Cold Run). The geometric mean of the ratios across all 43 queries forms the final score, emphasizing consistent performance across diverse scenarios.

In the latest results, SelectDB achieved the highest query performance without any tuning. On the c6a.4xlarge, 500 GB gp2 instance, SelectDB ranked first among all products, with Hot Run and Cold Run scores 35% and 25% better than the runner‑up respectively. Nearly half of the 43 queries were fastest on SelectDB, establishing a new performance baseline.

Write efficiency was also strong: importing 70 GB of data took 482 seconds, yielding a single‑node write speed exceeding 140 MB/s, placing SelectDB second in write throughput on the same hardware.

When comparing query latency, SelectDB reduced overall query times by 63%‑99% relative to other top‑ranked products, with some metrics showing a 459% advantage.

On a larger instance (c6a.metal, 500 GB gp2), SelectDB’s Cold Run latency was only one‑quarter to one‑tenth of competing products, delivering up to an 11‑fold advantage without any tuning.

SelectDB is the commercial arm behind Apache Doris. Its founding team includes former Baidu Intelligent Cloud staff and core contributors to the Doris project, with technical talent drawn from leading internet and cloud companies such as Baidu, Tencent, Alibaba, AWS, and others (technical staff 76%).

Built on Apache Doris and designed as a multi‑cloud, cloud‑native data warehouse, SelectDB offers fast, easy‑to‑use, real‑time, and unified capabilities, supporting multiple cloud providers (Alibaba Cloud, Tencent Cloud, AWS) and a variety of data types.

The results demonstrate that SelectDB’s performance is not a marketing hype but a concrete, data‑driven achievement, especially notable given the company’s brief history.